


Wild Combination

by tinroof



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: F/F, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kid Fic, M/M, POV Alternating, Parenthood, Past Sexual Abuse, Post-Canon Fix-It, Richie and Eddie Playing Matchmaker, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:00:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 56,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24491668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinroof/pseuds/tinroof
Summary: Six weeks and two earnest confessions of feeling after that weekend in Derry, Eddie's left his wife and moved into Richie's West Loop bachelor pad. But their hazy, happy honeymoon period is interrupted when Bev arrives on their doorstep. She's pregnant. She's not especially interested in raising a child. And when her gynecologist suggested giving the baby to a nice gay couple, she could think of one couple and one couple only.
Relationships: Beverly Marsh/Kay McCall, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 44
Kudos: 120
Collections: Richie/Eddie Bigbang 2019





	1. Richie, Six Weeks

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Reddie Big Bang, everyone! I'll be posting new chapters of this fic every three days during the Bang, which should take us just about to the end of July. Strap in, folks. 
> 
> Thanks to the organizers for weathering a literal global pandemic to keep this event on track. Thanks to Frankie for being such a superb beta. And thanks especially to ashleyrguillory on Tumblr for furnishing this fic with accompanying art. 
> 
> When I decided to write a fic involving a pregnancy, I didn't anticipate that I'd have to earn a goddamned medical degree in order to ensure accuracy, but I did my very best. In addition to the various medical websites I consulted, I owe a debt to Meaghan O'Connell's "And Now We Have Everything," Karen Russell's "Orange World," and Matthew Klam's "The Liver" for demystifying the intricacies of pregnancy, labor, and the precise texture of newborn baby poop.
> 
> Blanket trigger warning for discussion of Beverly's CSA, Sonia's emotional abuse, homophobia (including of the internalized variety), and homophobic slurs. 
> 
> Title's from "That's Us/Wild Combination" by Arthur Russell.

Let me tell you how Eddie gets up in the morning: at the asscrack of dawn, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, with some old Frank Sinatra song echoing out of his alarm clock. Next step’s a shower, standing under the hot jets, steaming his pores open. It’s the first item in a skincare routine more than a little like Patrick Bateman’s, minus the murder. Then he does a half-hour on the Peloton, which I still don’t get -- isn’t the whole point of riding a bike that you’re going someplace? -- and then he downs this ghastly combo of twigs and leaves and berries mashed up with yogurt in a little glass blender thing-y that I’ve never touched because I know I’ll lop a finger off if I try. Then he gets dressed: white shirt, steamed smooth, silk tie, sharp suit in some dark, dusky colour -- usually black, blue if he’s feeling spicy, sometimes this off-brown, red-y color. I don’t know what you’d call it. I don’t follow fashion much. Doesn’t matter. He looks drop-dead no matter what he wears. (Course, you ask me, he looks best with no clothes on at all! Hey-o!) 

Last stop before he leaves for the bank is our bed, my bedside. He leans down, kisses my forehead, drops a note on the nightstand. _I love you, Richie,_ he wrote, once. _You’re my first thought when I wake up and my last thought before I fall asleep_.

Now, I’m still drooling on the second pillow for all of this. After decades of doing stand-up, I’m used to passing out at 3 or 4, so I usually wake up mid-afternoon to an empty apartment and that note on the nightstand. Only reason I even know about Eddie’s morning routine is he writes it all down in his bullet journal and he left it open on the kitchen table once. Every day’s got a twenty-point list, all the shit he’s gotta do before he goes to work: “blend smoothie,” “kiss Richie’s forehead,” “apply Drops of Youth Eye Concentrate,” which, to me, sounds like something straight out of a witch’s lab. 

Wait. Witches don’t have labs. Or do they? Are there major-league, medical-grade witches out there with sleek anti-septic labs? Who can say for sure?

Here’s my point: this whole thing of Eddie writing “kiss Richie’s forehead” on his to-do-list, and then kissing my forehead, and then checking it off, every single day, without fail? It’s very sweet. It’s very nice. It’s very much the kind of thing I’d have creamed myself over when I was fourteen years old, white-knuckling it through my nightly wet dreams about Eddie Kaspbrak. And I wish I’d known, back then, about the to-do lists, the kisses. It would’ve taken some of the sting out of hand-scrubbing my boxers in the bathroom sink with a bar of Dove because I wasn’t about to toss them in the hamper with the rest of my shit and wind up on the receiving end of some grim motherly lecture about nocturnal emissions. If I could go back, if I could stand over the shoulder of my younger self, if I could say to him, “Rich, kid, give it thirty years, and Eddie’s gonna be writing ‘kiss Richie’ on his anal little to-do lists?” I’d have spent a lot less of my teen years slicing my wrists skin-deep to Siouxsie Sioux, I’ll tell you that much.

So I don’t want to whine about the love of my life kissing me tenderly on the forehead every morning before he goes to work. I’m not an ingrate. I know how lucky I am. But I have to admit it’s not exactly what I anticipated after our trip to Derry and our brush with death and that whole long weekend we spent in Eddie’s bed on the third floor of the Town House with the Do Not Disturb sign dangling from the doorknob. God, what a rush. And we didn’t even fuck! No, that first weekend was all kisses, curled together under the covers, talking in low voices, trading secrets. Gay shit like that. Eddie was pretty shy about sex -- still is, don’t know why I said “was” -- so that’s all he wanted to do those first few days. Sleep in my arms, wake up, stay there all day. 

I’m not gonna lie: I miss that. I miss those long, lazy mornings, nothing to do and nowhere to be. There’s no room for that in Eddie’s get-up-and-go routine. I’d love to haul him back to bed, snicker behind my hand while he calls in sick, and then take a whole day off. Just ten or twelve hours of him and me and uninterrupted bedtime. That’s what Eddie calls sex, by the way, since we started having it. “Bedtime.” We’ll be up late on a Monday night, watching a movie, and then he’ll glance over at me on the couch and he’ll wiggle his brows and he’ll say, “Bedtime?” It’s so hot.

So that’s why I’m down in the kitchen at goddamned four o’clock on a Sunday morning mixing up an extravagant breakfast-in-bed. I’m going all in. I’ve got toast. I’ve got butter -- the real shit, a whole brick of it. I’ve got orange juice. I’ve got a recipe for how to make scrambled eggs on a stovetop with only three ingredients. I’ve got these little mini-quiches that you pop in the oven for fifteen minutes and then they’re all set, gourmet, restaurant quality.

And that’s when -- oh, fuck, this is all gonna have to be in the past tense for me to tell this story right, yeah? 

Okay. Let me try again.

So I was standing in the kitchen at goddamned four o’clock on a Sunday morning and I’d just slid the mini-quiches into the oven when my phone buzzed in my pocket. Not a little buzz. Not the buzz of a Screen Time notification that says, like, “You spent sixty hours on your phone last week, you reprobate. What the hell is wrong with you?” No, a long buzz. The buzz of somebody calling me. On my phone. At goddamned four o’clock on a Sunday morning. 

I was gonna let it go to voicemail, which I never check, but here’s the thing: I’d had to fumble through my wallet to get my drivers’ license out at the Laugh Factory last night, and my Loaded Pierogi loyalty card must have fallen out, ‘cause when I stopped for a little Soviet snack on the way home from my set, the card wasn’t there. I’d had to pay full price for my plate of pierogies. So if someone was calling me this early, I figured it had to be that they’d found my Loaded Pierogi loyalty card.

So I pulled my phone out of my pocket. “BEVERLY MARSH,” the screen said. And I was like, huh? The fuck? I slid the little green icon across the screen and I lifted the phone to my ear and I said, “Hello?” and she said, “Hello? Richie?” Her voice sounded all weird -- shaky, watery. I was like, “Bev? Everything okay?” and she gave me this weak little, “No, not really.” 

And if I were a smarter man, this is where I would have turned off the oven and pulled the frying pan off the stove and given my full attention to the phone call. But I am not a smart man, and I have never claimed to be, so instead, I sandwiched the phone between my shoulder and my ear and I poured too much milk into the eggs and I asked her, “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t even know where to begin,” she said.

“Help me out,” I said. “Is it Pennywise?”

“No.”

“Your bastard husband?”

“No. Also, ex-husband. Filed for divorce a few weeks back.” 

“Oh. Congrats.”

“Thanks.” 

I heard a sound, then, from her end of the line -- a pinched breath in, a long, labored breath out -- and since I’ve been smoking Camels with Bev since I was thirteen years old, it was a sound I knew well. 

“I thought you were trying to quit,” I said.

“I know. I really should,” she said, and a second later, more sharply, “Wait, _fuck_ ,” and then I heard her coughing, and then, faintly, her foot coming down on pavement, grinding. “I just put it out,” she said, matter-of-factly, and then coughed again.

“Okay,” I said. “Good for you.”

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

And then she coughed again, and I was like, “ _Jesus_ , Bev,” and the cough turned into a staticky sob on her end of the line. 

Neither of us said much for a couple minutes after that. It was just her, breathing heavy, trying not to cry, and me starting questions, stopping them: “Are you…” and “Do you know…” and “How far…” I stared like an idiot at the eggs in the pan. When did I need to flip them? Were you even supposed to flip them? Or just stir them around? I stuck the wooden spoon into the pan, the jiggly mass, all white and yellow. A bunch of it was stuck to the bottom. I wondered about taking the pan off the stove and scraping it all out and trying again. Scrambled eggs were easy, I thought. That’s why I’d picked them.

“You’re not being very helpful,” she said. 

“Well, I don’t… What am I supposed to… I mean, how’d it even happen, Bev?”

“What do you mean, _how’d it happen_? You’ve been with Eddie, what, a month and a half? And you’ve already forgotten where babies come from?”

“I’m gay, Bev, not stupid.”

“You’re both.”

“Nice,” I said. “Thanks for that.” 

“I didn’t have my pills with me,” she said. “That’s how it happened. I ran away from Tom barefoot at four in the fucking morning with nothing but my phone and my wallet. Completely forgot to refill the prescription after I flew out to Maine.”

“Hold on,” I said. “You got pregnant while we were in Derry?”

“I must have,” she said. “I’m six weeks along. And I was always on the pill with Tom.”

“Okay,” I said. “Have you talked to Ben yet?” 

“No,” she said, miserably. Which confused me, because I’d understand her being all upset if it was Tom’s baby, but she and Ben were in love, I thought. Happily settled down in Hemingford Home. And then she said, “I actually don’t know if he’s… if the baby’s… you know.”

“What do you mean? You don’t know if Ben’s the dad?” 

“Yeah,” she said. “That weekend was… It was weird. A weird weekend.”

Oh, fuck. I didn’t like what she was implying.

“Are you, um…” I paused, lowered my voice. “Are you saying Pennywise had something to do with...”

“ _What?_ How would that even…”

“I don’t know! Maybe he used some evil clown magic to, like, supernaturally insert --”

“No,” she interrupted. “No, Richie. I got pregnant from having sex. With a human man.” 

“A human man?” Now I was really confused. “But not Ben?” 

“Well, maybe Ben,” she said. “We did sleep together that weekend. Quite a few times, actually.”

“I know, Bev. Pretty thin walls in the Town House.” 

“It’s just…” She paused, exhaled, and then: “Earlier on? Like, the day before that? I… I slept with Bill.”

“Oh,” I said. Bill was married. To his wife. “Oh, fuck.” 

“Yeah,” she said. “Fuck.”

“Can you do a paternity test?” 

“You have to wait ‘til nine weeks,” she said. “I’m only six along.” 

“Okay, so just wait out the three weeks,” I said. “If it’s Ben, no worries. And if it’s Bill...” 

“Actually, um, Ben and I…” Another heavy breath out. “We’re taking a break.” 

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“And I don’t want kids,” she said. “I’ve never wanted kids. Not with Tom, and obviously not with Bill, and…” Her voice wavered. She swallowed. “And not with Ben, either, turns out.” 

“Oh, Bevvie,” I hummed, that old nickname she’d loved when we were kids. “If you need an abortion… I mean, I guess they’re not the best about that shit, way out in Nebraska. But if you wanted to fly up to Chicago, me and Eddie could put you up in our guest room, drive you places, give you some moral support…” 

She laughed. I heard a flicker of a sob in it. 

“I actually just went to a clinic yesterday,” she said. “Talked to a counselor.”

“Okay,” I said. “And?”

She was quiet for a second. I looked at the stove. I thought I might be able to salvage the eggs. Reached for a spatula, scraped them out of the pan, onto a plate: yellow, scrambled. Crushing it, Tozier.

“We talked about options,” she said. “The counselor and me. And she, um… she mentioned adoption.”

“All right.” 

“She was going on about all these families who want to adopt. Said she could find me a match if I wanted to go that route.”

“A match?” 

“She was talking about, like, older parents who can’t have kids of their own, single parents, gay couples.” She paused, breathed deep. “And that’s when I thought of you.” 

“What do you mean?”

“You and Eddie,” she said. “It just seemed so clear to me.” I was silent, confused, so she continued: “I mean, here I am, pregnant with this baby I don’t want, and meanwhile, you and Eddie… You’ve been through all this bullshit. And now you’re finally together. Maybe you want to start a family. Maybe this is how.”

It took me a second. 

“You want me and Eddie to adopt your baby?” 

“I mean, you don’t have to do it.” She let out a sound, next door to a laugh, too sad to really be one. “I’m sorry. This was stupid. I’m not really thinking straight. I shouldn’t have…”

“No, no, no,” I interrupted. “We just haven’t really talked yet, me and Eddie. About kids. Whether to have them. We’ve only been living together a month and a half. He’s still sorting stuff out with Myra.” 

“Sure. Of course.”

“I mean, I do want kids,” I said -- not knowing I was going to say it, only realizing just then how true it was. I wanted kids. I really, really wanted kids. I always had. Even more now that I had Eddie to raise them with. “So, um… I guess I’ll ask Eddie.”

“Right.” Bev sounded a little calmer now, like she’d stepped back from the verge of tears. “Okay. Why don’t you give me a call when you two have had a chance to…” 

And then the fucking smoke alarm went off.

“Fuck!” I shouted. “The fucking oven! Fuck!” 

I tossed the phone to the center island.

“What’s going on?” Bev’s voice was faint, far away, through the receiver. “Is everything okay?” 

“The mini-quiches,” I groaned. “No, no, no…” 

I tugged on the oven mitts. I pulled out the tray. God, they were destroyed. Twelve little heaps of charcoal spewing smoke. I dumped the tray on the counter, coughed, yanked open a window. But the stupid alarm was still wailing, so I had to drag a chair across the floor, clamber up onto it, fan the air with a tea towel. 

And that’s how Eddie found me when he walked into the kitchen shiny with sweat from his morning Peloton ride. In his sexy little Lycra shorts. In a t-shirt -- one of mine, huge on him: _Montréal! Juste pour rire!_

“Richie,” he groaned. “What did you do?”

“I burned breakfast,” I paused, coughed. “Hey, sidebar: do you want kids?” 


	2. Beverly, Six Weeks

The autumn after we first beat Pennywise, two days into my freshman year at Derry High, my guidance counselor asked me how I’d been adjusting to my new environment. I replied simply that my father had been raping me every night for as long as I could remember, and things moved pretty quickly from there. The police remanded my father into custody that afternoon, and I was excused from school and sent to the hospital. I remember, though I’ve tried very hard to forget, the agonizing, hours-long forensic exam with a lady doctor who tried her very best to be kind to me. After all that, after the paperwork and the social workers and the nights in a crowded group home in Portland, I was placed with the first foster family willing to take on a serially abused fourteen-year-old girl with a bad reputation and a boy’s haircut and a bevy of venereal diseases. 

The Hartleys lived in a great big old run-down house in Lewiston with butter-yellow paint peeling off the walls. They were an older couple with years of fostering under their belts, and they ran the place like a well-oiled machine: six or seven kids at a time, often sick ones, severely disabled ones. I figured they chose me because I was of sound mind and mobile, a sorely needed pair of hands to wash dishes and scrub toilets and burp babies. Mr. and Mrs. Hartley were always friendly to me, so I didn’t mind the chores too much, but I wasn’t the best babysitter. Not long after I moved in, a stomach bug made its way around the house. One of the kids, a really little girl with a cleft palate, threw up all over me while I was trying to rock her to sleep. It was a hot, slippery rush, her vomit, and it stank, dried in clumps in my hair, clung stickily to my skin. I made up my mind, then and there, soaked in the stuff: I would never, ever have kids.

It was a relief, this thought. I couldn’t control much, but I could control this. There was a pill for it. It was ninety-nine-point-nine-percent effective. I asked Mrs. Hartley the very next day if she could drive me to the doctor for a prescription, and she said yes, and that was that. 

Fucking Bill had been an insane lapse in judgment. Fucking him without the pill was even worse. And I should’ve said no to Ben, even though it had seemed like a fine idea at the time. At the very least, I should’ve gone to Keene’s and re-filled my prescription before I said yes to him. But I’d felt something like shelter, that frenzied weekend in Derry, in the arms of these men. They would never hit me. They would never spit on me, or swear at me, or strangle me. The sex with Ben, especially, was so gentle, so safe, that it had hardly felt like sex at all. Not like any sex I’d ever known, at least. It was so unlike everything that had come before it that I’d thought I must be in love.

Now, watching O’Hare disappear in the rearview of Kay’s red convertible, I knew I hadn’t been. Whatever I’d felt for Ben, it wasn’t enough to keep me in Hemingford Home with him. It wasn’t enough to make that piss-soaked pregnancy test feel like anything but a trap in the palm of my hand. 

“You’ve really been through it this past month, huh?” Kay said from the driver’s seat, tilting her big teal-and-tortoiseshell shades down to look at me. “You sure you want to do this?”

“Not at all,” I said. “Don’t know if they’re sure, either. They’ve only been together six weeks.”

“Since Derry?”

“Exactly.” 

Kay McCall, my best friend of a decade and change, the woman who’d taken a beating from Tom when he came after me -- she was the only person I’d trusted with the reality of that weekend in Derry. Well, the lightly edited reality, anyway. We’d been in town for a friend’s funeral, I’d told her. We’d gone to explore an old childhood haunt, and the condemned house had all but collapsed on us. This near-death experience had not only brought us together but compelled us do some crazy shit: Richie had come out of the closet, Eddie had left his wife for Richie, and I had fucked not one but two of my middle-school sweethearts, one of whom did the deed so well that I’d up and moved to Nebraska with him.

A little implausible, sure. But more convincing than the truth, the sewer, the clown from outer space.

Kay pursed her lips, returned her eyes to the road ahead. “And you really think they’ll stay together?”

I glanced at her, queasy. I’d thrown up once already on the plane, and I could feel myself getting dizzy again, carsick _and_ morning sick. “The hell kind of question is that?”

She grimaced. “Well, you and this Ben guy…” 

“We weren’t soulmates.” I rolled down the window, drank in the stream of cool air. “Not like Richie and Eddie. I mean, Richie, for God’s sake, he was carving their initials into the Kissing Bridge when he was thirteen years old.”

“And Ben was writing you poems,” she said. “And look how that turned out.” 

“They’re the real deal,” I insisted. “Eddie left his wife for Richie.”

“You left your husband for Ben, didn’t you?”

“I left my husband, period,” I said. “Ben didn’t enter into it.”

“Fair enough,” she said. “I’m still proud of you for dumping the motherfucker.” 

“Thanks,” I said, and I lifted my hands to my temples, rubbed circles, sighed. Talking about Tom was pretty high on the list of my least favorite things to do. “But anyway, getting back to the baby.”

“Right,” she said. “The baby.”

“We’re just going over there to have a conversation,” I said. “Maybe they want the kid. Maybe they don’t. Maybe I’ll get an abortion this afternoon. But I want to have the talk, at least.”

She reached over -- at first, I thought, for the stick shift, but her hand landed on my thigh. She stilled my nervous, bouncing knee. 

“You’re in control here, Beverly,” she said. “You know that, right?”

“Of course,” I said.

“You make this choice. Nobody else. Not Richie and Eddie, not Ben or Bill. You’re calling all the shots. And if you want to get an abortion, you can get an abortion.”

“I know,” I said. “It wouldn’t be my first.” 

She nodded solemnly and she didn’t say another word until we pulled up outside Richie and Eddie’s building. She parked, twisted the key out of the ignition. She turned to me. 

“You still want to do this?” she asked. “You want to have this talk?” 

I nodded. “Yeah, Kay. I do.” 

It was Eddie who met us at the door, brought us up in the elevator, steered us into their living room. Richie had called this place home for years, I knew, a big, airy condo with floor-to-ceiling windows, carved out of an old factory in the West Loop. But the furniture looked new -- brand new, fresh out of the store, I guessed, from the smell. Clean lines, simple fabrics, neutral tones: pure Eddie. Across from a sofa the colour of slate, they’d mounted a wide-screen television on the wall, along with a DVD rack exploding with color: Adam Sandler flicks, countless SNL “Best Of” collections, full seasons of _South Park_ and _The Simpsons_. It was a little shocking how well the space combined their most opposite qualities: Eddie’s careful minimalism, Richie’s joyful excess. 

“So,” Eddie began, when we’d all sat down around the coffee table. “Richie tells me you’re…” He swallowed, hesitant. “Expecting.”

I laughed. I’d missed this, his squeamishness. “Yes, Eddie. I’m expecting.”

“Don’t mind him.” Richie rested a hand on Eddie’s shoulder. He gave me an apologetic look. “Eddie still says ‘penis’ instead of ‘cock.’” 

Eddie gently swatted Richie’s hand away. “And you’ve said you’re interested in, um…” he began, calmly, but the rest came out in an anxious rush: “...in-having-us-adopt…”

“Right, yes,” I interrupted, to put him out of his misery. “I don’t want to have kids, and I figured that if you two were looking to start a family, this might be a good way around the whole adoption headache.” 

Richie bit his lip. “Do you even want to be pregnant?” 

I took in a deep breath. I wasn’t much enjoying the experience so far -- the puking, the sore tits, the constant urge to pee. But I could bear it, I thought. I’d certainly weathered worse.

“It’s only seven more months,” I said. 

“Well, not necessarily,” Richie said. “You hear all the time about babies being born way earlier than that. You might get lucky.”

“Richie.” Eddie pressed his palms to his forehead, sucked in a breath through his teeth. “For the love of God.” 

“Okay, enough of this.” Kay rose from her perch, stood up, spread out her hands. “There’s only one question here: Richie, Eddie, do you want to adopt Beverly’s fetus? Yes or no?” 

They looked at each other, then, Richie and Eddie. I waited for them to talk, but they never did. They just stared at each other. Richie lifted an eyebrow. Eddie licked his bottom lip with the tip of his tongue. There was a whole language in the tics of their faces, known only to the two of them. They didn’t need words.

I don’t think I’ve ever loved anybody as much as they clearly loved each other.

A few more moments passed in silence. Then, suddenly, smiles broke out, all at once, on both of their faces. 

Kay turned back to me, grinned.

“Well,” she said. “I guess we’ve got our answer.” 


	3. Eddie, Six Weeks

“We’re going to have a baby,” I said, that night, as Richie was climbing into bed beside me. “We’ve only been together a month and a half, and we’re going to have a baby.” 

Richie stopped where he was, one knee on the mattress, one hand lifting the duvet. He was wearing the button-up blue plaid pajamas I’d bought him to replace the ratty boxers he’d been wearing to bed. His curly hair was still damp from the shower. He smelled like my tea-tree soap. I’d really spruced him up, I thought, with a not insignificant amount of pride.

“That’s your freak-y out-y voice,” he said. “You don’t want to back out, do you?”

“No, no, no.” The words spilled out, rapid. “Not at all. I’m just…”

And I trailed off, and I laughed, because I couldn’t think of how to put what I felt into words. It was hard to understand, even harder to explain, how wonderful the last three weeks had been. Like magic. Like a curse had been lifted. Especially when I thought about the last twenty-seven years of my life, the total absence of anything like joy in them. And now! Now, this sudden pivot, this brush with death! The way I’d fallen, quite literally, into Richie’s arms, and the sheer audacity I’d had to stay there. I’d expected to be punished for loving him, but instead, I’d been rewarded, richly so. The decades with Myra were done, gone, like they’d never happened, like we’d never lived in that dull grey townhouse in Westchester with the plastic houseplants. I was here, in this airy loft that Richie called home, in his big, wide bed. I woke up every morning with that old Perry Como number ringing out from my alarm clock: _Every day’s a holiday because you’re married to me_...

Not that I was married to Richie, of course. We hadn’t really talked about it yet -- both aware, I think, that we were still only six weeks in, that the divorce would take a while yet to iron out. Everything was right, so right, but rightness was no excuse to go rushing into things. 

Or so I’d told myself ‘til today.

“A baby,” I said, again, on the swell of a laugh. “We’re going to have a baby.” 

Richie laughed, and he leaned forward, and he kissed me on the forehead. 

“You’re going to be such a good daddy,” he said.

I knew he didn’t mean it like _that_ , but I still must have startled a little, because he winced as he climbed into the bed.

“Sorry, Eds,” he said, voice soft, as he removed his glasses, tossed them onto his nightstand. “Didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.” 

“It’s fine,” I hummed, stirring a little under the blankets, moving closer to him. “I know you meant it the old-fashioned way.”

“Is that what you want our kid to call you?” he asked, pulling the covers up to our chins. “Daddy?” 

“I think I prefer Dad,” I said. “Not as sexy.” 

“Got that right.” He laughed. “Oh, yeah, punish me, _Dad_.”

“Terrible.” I socked him, soft, in the ribs. “Just terrible.” 

“Punish me, Papa,” he continued, not deterred in the least. “Punish me, Father, for I have sinned…” 

“We’re really running the gamut of kinks here, aren’t we?”

A loud, raucous laugh, the kind I loved best. “Don’t tell me you’re into the priest thing!”

“I’m not,” I said, shuffling closer, laying on his chest. “I’m into the ‘you’ thing. And the ‘us’ thing. And the ‘we’re going to have a baby’ thing.” 

“Yeah, we are,” he said, and he wrapped his arms around me. So much joy in his voice. “One of our very own.” 

He found the shell of my ear and pressed his lips there, and even though I was wearing my warmest flannel pajamas, I couldn’t help but shiver a little. 

“Hey,” I said, quietly. “Bedtime?”

He lifted his eyes, blinked, feigned innocence. “We’re already in bed.”

“Come on, Richie.” I slipped a hand into the pajama shirt I’d bought him, between the buttons. “ _Bedtime_. You know what I mean.”

“I know that you have to be up early for work tomorrow,” he said, voice flat, even as I found his nipple, toyed with it between two fingers. “I know you’ll be cranky in the morning if we stay up too late.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “We’re having a baby. We should celebrate. Just a little.” 

“All this daddy and papa talk is really turning you on, huh?” 

I buried my head against his shoulder, pressed a kiss to his collarbone through the soft flannel. “Maybe,” I said. “And so what if it is?”

He laughed. “Promise you won’t be mad if you’re all groggy in the morning?” 

“We’ll make it quick,” I said. “Just use your hand. Come on.” 

I reached for his hand, held it, dragged his fingers down to where I was already half-hard. 

“Holy shit,” he said, breathily, a little awestruck. I felt him tug at the drawstring waist of my pajama pants, felt his fingertips brush against the tip of my penis. “This _is_ turning you on. You’re all wet.”

I felt myself flush red, embarrassed and aroused all at once. 

“So do something about it,” I muttered. 

He grinned. He lowered his hand, circled my penis with his fingers. He began to move. 

“You’re going to be so good at this,” he whispered. The strokes of his hand were slow, steadily timed. “Such a good dad, yeah? Gonna teach our kid to ride a bike. Get a little helmet, elbow pads, knee pads… Not gonna risk any scrapes, no sir...” 

He twisted his wrist, and the laugh bubbling up in my throat became a moan as I fell forward, my cheek against his shoulder. “Oh my God,” I gasped. “Do that again.” 

“You’re going to join the PTA,” he said, doing it again. I bucked forward, into his hand. “No, wait. Knowing you? You’re going to _run_ the PTA. With an iron fist.” 

“Richie, please,” I gasped. “Go faster. Or just… just stop fucking around and…”

“You’re gonna take that little blender thing you use to make smoothies,” he whispered, conspiratorial, right into my ear, “and you’re gonna go to the farmer’s market and buy, like, organic carrots and shit, and you’re gonna puree them to make homemade baby food, ‘cause Gerber’s not good enough, no way, not for the precious fruit of _your_ loins…” 

“Okay, okay, no,” I said, pulling up, away, out of breath. “I can’t… You can’t… I need more. More than this.” 

“Yeah?” he said, gazing up at me, great big dumb grin on his face. He lifted his arms, crossed them behind his head. “What do you need, Eddie? Go on and tell me.” 

He knew I hated to ask for things, to say out loud what I wanted. So much easier to just let him steer. 

“You know what I need,” I dodged.

“Say it.” He lifted a hand, traced the line of my jaw with his fingers, brought them to the partition of my lips. “Tell me exactly how you want it.” 

I tried, failed, to catch my breath. I’d unbuttoned his pajama top and I was staring, now, at his bare chest, rising and falling beneath that thatch of dark, curly hair. He must have seen I was distracted. When I opened my mouth to speak, he slipped two fingers into my mouth and pressed them to the pillow of my tongue. I closed my eyes; he slid his fingers in, out.

“I…” I began, around his fingers. “I want…”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

I reached up, fingers around his wrist, and tugged his hand away from my mouth. His eyes went wide, startled. 

“What the hell, Eds?”

“Don’t ask me a question and then stick your hand in my mouth while I’m trying to give you an answer.”

“Eddie, I was just --”

“It’s really rude.”

“But I need to lube up my --”

“So use _lube_ ,” I huffed. “Not my saliva.”

He rolled his eyes, reached out a long arm for the Astroglide on his nightstand. “Fussy, fussy.” 

“That’s no way to talk to the father of your child.” 

He looked back over to me, his hands slick now with lube. There was a funny gleam in his eye. 

“Say that again,” he said. 

“Say what?”

I shifted closer, brushed a few damp curls out of his eyes. I saw, then, that there were tears bubbling up at the corners.

“Say you’re the father of my child,” he said.

He closed his eyes. I leaned in, pressed my lips to his eyelids.

“I’m the father of your child,” I said. 

“Oh my God,” he whispered, eyes still closed. He took in a long, shaky breath. “Okay. Get on your back.”

I did as I was told, relieved to be taking orders. With slick hands, he tugged my flannel pants down to my ankles, and I kicked them all the way off. I worked the buttons of my pajama shirt open because his hands, surely, would be too slippery for the task. I sat up a little; he helped me ease the fabric off my shoulders. And then he was hovering over me, balancing on the mattress with one hand, skating up my thigh with the other. 

“You want to have a baby with me?” he said, voice low. 

“I do,” I said. “I really do.” 

I lifted my legs, let my knees fall open; one finger, two fingers, three. A mess of kissing, rapid, wet, his mouth, my neck, my chest. It wasn’t until he was lining our hips up, until I could feel him sliding slowly into me, that he spoke again. 

“God, Eddie,” he said. A gasp, sharp. “Let’s do it. Let’s make a baby.” 

“Wait.” I was breathing, hard, my back leaping in an arc off the bed. “Did you just say…”

“Yeah,” he said, and brought his arms around me, pulling me to his chest. “Let me fill you up.”

“Oh, fuck.” I was aching with desire, overwhelmed by the sheer depth of my need. “Do it. I want it.”

“You want it?” he repeated. “Tell me how bad you want it.” 

“Fuck, Richie.” My head fell onto his shoulder; I gasped. “Need… need it. Your baby. Ours.”

“You want me to…” His voice broke as he lifted his head, looked down, drank in the sight of me, utterly wrecked. “You want me to put a baby in… inside of you?”

“Please,” I said. It was all I could say. “Please.”

I lifted a leg, hooked it around his waist, dug my heel deep into the curve of his ass. He moaned, pulled me even closer than before -- chest to chest, skin to skin, the friction unbearable in the best way. Sex was always good with him, but it hadn’t felt like _this_ \-- raw, fevered, ecstatic -- since the first time we’d decided not to use a condom. That time, like this one, I’d felt this sense of almost self-destructive daring, like I was consenting to let Richie shatter me and piece the glittering shards back together. Maybe that was why I’d been so hesitant to have sex with him in the beginning. With Myra, I’d only ever felt the breakage. I hadn’t known Richie could sift through the rubble and build new things with what he found there.

He must have felt it when my orgasm arrived -- the sudden bloom of semen between us, spilling onto my stomach and his -- because he gasped, and he bit back a _fuck_ , and then he doubled his pace, moving faster, harder, so vigorously I could feel myself springing off the mattress with each stroke. 

My cheek against his, my lips were so close to his ear that I only had to whisper it: “Richie?”

“Yeah?”

“Come for me.”

“Oh, fuck,” he said. “I’m close, Eddie. I’m so close. I promise. I’m…” 

“In me,” I whispered. “Give… give me a baby…” 

All at once, with a shout that nearly shattered my eardrums, he was there, coming, coming hard. I fell out of his arms, bounced a little as I settled back into the bed. I looked up, watched him come down from his orgasm. I loved him like this. Breaths short, eyes closed, chest heaving and shimmering with sweat. A long line of my semen gleamed on his stomach. A thought came into my head, something I’d never considered before, something that would have struck me as disgusting mere weeks ago: What if I were to lift my hand, and trace a finger across that white river, put it to his lips, make him lick it up? Ask him how it tasted? How _I_ tasted?

But we were already on to the usual business with the wet wipes, his hands moving gently between my legs, across my stomach, across his own. 

When it was all over, when he’d been to the bathroom and washed his hands, he climbed back into the bed, took me in his arms, and pressed me to his naked chest.

“So,” he said.

“So,” I said.

“Was that, like…” He trailed off, took in a breath. “Problematic?”

“Problematic?” I lifted my head, narrowed my eyes. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The whole thing with, like…” He sighed, and his hand flailed free, trying to explain. “With the baby talk and shit. Putting a baby in you. It was kind of like, um… sexist. Or whatever.”

I laughed, fell back to his chest. “Since when do you care about being P.C.?”

“I don’t,” he said, his voice still more than a little anxious. “I just don’t ever want you to feel weird. I don’t want to push you.”

“You know, Rich…” I paused, propped my hands beneath my chin so I could look him in the eye. “I think I actually do need you to push me.” 

“Eddie…” he started, but I shushed him, a hand over his mouth. 

“Sex scares the shit out of me,” I said. “You know that, right?”

He nodded, still silent, my fingers against his lips.

“And I know I’ve gotten better about it,” I continued. “Like, less afraid, at least. But it always feels a little like I’m getting shoved out of a plane.” 

He brought a thumb to my cheek, brushed. “Baby,” he said, softly, muffled beneath my hand. He pressed a kiss to my palm. “I’m sorry.” 

“You don’t have to be sorry.” I lifted my hand. I kissed his mouth. “With you, there’s a parachute. There’s a place to land. So stop apologizing for being the best fuck I’ve ever had in my life.”

He laughed, then, and his arms circled me again. We must have fallen asleep like that, because when I woke up and looked in the mirror, I found the pattern of his chest engraved lightly on my cheek.


	4. Richie, Two Months

I blew my back out the day Eddie moved in. (No, not in a sexy way. I wish, man.) We were up in the back of the U-Haul he’d just driven from Westchester to the West Loop, and since I’m not exactly known for my rugged physique, I was looking for something lightweight. You know, bed linens, clothes, stuffed animals. Something easy. That’s around the time my eyes landed on a little cardboard box: _Willow Tree Angels_ , permanent marker, Eddie’s tidy cursive. Jackpot. I bent over.

Next thing I knew, I was face-down on the floor in the back of the U-Haul and Eddie was rubbing IcyHot all over my lower back and being like, “Bend from the _knee_ , idiot.” Good thing about Eddie: the man’s always got a first aid kit on hand. We’re ever on a plane, anyone ever yells, “Doctor, doctor, is there a doctor on board?” Eddie’s got it handled. No medical degree, sure, but when has that ever stopped him?

“Why do you even have those things?” I said. Well, groaned, more like. “They’re evangelical propaganda.”

“They are not,” he said. “They are non-denominational wooden figurines.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Of _angels_.”

“But it’s about what they represent, see?” Eddie fell back on his knees, grabbed an X-Acto, and reached for the box that had wrecked me. A second later, he was holding a soft bundle of crinkled paper and masking tape. He peeled back the layers with careful fingers. “See, look at this one: the Angel of Freedom.”

It was a hunk of wood whittled into the vague shape of an angel. On the tip of a craggy outstretched arm, she -- or he? or it? -- was balancing a tiny wire insect.

“So the butterfly is a metaphor for courage and independence,” Eddie said. “Actually, it’s kind of perfect for us right now. Because you’d give this to someone who was setting out on a new path, like a college graduate, or someone who was setting out to travel the world,” or blah blah blah, something else, I forget what exactly he said, because just then, I wasn’t listening. I was looking at him -- his quick mouth, his bright, dancing eyes -- and I was thinking: _This is it. I’m moving in with a man. A man who not only collects Willow Tree Angels, but memorizes the symbolism of every one of those gay little pieces of wood. The closet door has sealed shut behind me. There is no going back. I have crossed the Rubik’s cube._

Eventually, we made it back up to the apartment. I sprawled out on the couch and strapped an ice-pack to my lower back. Meanwhile, Eddie marched around grumbling about how he’d just spent two fuckin’ days driving all the way from fuckin’ Westchester and now he had to unpack all these fuckin’ boxes all by his fuckin’ self all because _somebody_ didn’t lift from the fuckin’ knee. And as I lay there, tuning out his mean little ass, I thought about how I’d tell the world. No, back up: _what_ would I tell them, even? That I was gay? That I had a boyfriend? That he lived with me? I couldn’t just hop up onstage and be like, “So my girlfriend caught me masturbating” anymore. It had always been a lie, yeah, but now it’d be worse than a lie. It would be like I was ashamed of Eddie. And sure, I was still a little ashamed of myself, deep down. But I was not, would not ever be, ashamed of Eddie Kaspbrak.

(I could be ashamed of his Willow Tree Angels, though. A guy’s got limits.)

So how was I supposed to come out, anyway? Maybe I could keep it on the down-low for now, wait for some reporter to be a dick and ask me outright. But how likely was that? Not very, considering I’d spent the last 27 years posing pretty convincingly as a red-blooded American breeder. Could I call up some paps and get them to snap me and Eddie buying lube at Safeway in our sweatpants? Not if I wanted to cling to the last scrap of my dignity, I couldn’t. What about that guy from Queer Eye, the Jesus-looking one? He came out as gender-liquid or something in a nail polish ad. That was savvy. I liked that. If I absolutely had to crawl out of the closet, I might as well squeeze some simoleons out of it. Only problem: who in their right mind would want me in a fashion spread? I had two guesses: a) no one, and b) maybe Tommy Bahama, if they were looking to hook middle-aged schlubs with low standards.

In the end, it wound up being a dumb spur-of-the-moment thing. I’d taken a nap while Eddie unpacked, and when I woke up, my back was, miraculously, in perfect working order. Only seemed fair to haul all the empty cardboard boxes down to the recycling bin. So I flattened a whole bunch and dragged them to the front door. But when I opened the closet to slide my sneakers on, surprise: Eddie had gotten to the shoe rack before I did. There were all of his pricy Italian leather loafers, polished to a shine in black and blue and caramel, lined up in a row, gold and silver buckles gleaming. And right next door, every pair of my unspeakably awful decades-old, dog-shit-encrusted, hole-in-the-toe sneakers. I just about lost my mind. Funniest thing I’d ever fucking seen. I crouched down and snapped a picture for Twitter.

_boyfriend just moved in_ , I typed. _can you tell where his shoes end and my shoes begin?_

I watched the cursor pulse next to that question mark. My thumb hovered over _Tweet_.

In the living room, tucked neatly into an armchair overlooking the skyline, Eddie was sipping a mug of tea, paging through that week’s Economist. I tapped his shoulder.

“Rich!” He turned his head, gave me a smile. I leaned down and kissed it. “How’s your back?”

“Oh, fine. Ice pack worked wonders.” I plopped my ass down on the armrest. “Hey, can I talk to you about something?”

He laid the magazine in his lap. “I’m all yours,” he said.

Dammit, I went all gooey inside. Couldn’t help it. “I’m all yours, too.”

His hand, my knee. “Did you just come over here to flirt?”

“Nope.” I took a deep breath, handed him my phone. “Here. Take a look.”

He squinted at the screen for a second -- and then he looked up, eyes bright with alarm.

“Did you post this?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Just took the picture and wrote the caption.”

“But you want to post it?”

“I wanted to ask you first,” I said. “Since it’s kind of a big step and all. Even though it doesn’t have, like, your name. Or your face.”

“Remind me,” he said, looking at the screen. “How many followers do you have?”

“Half a mil.”

“Shit.” A low whistle. “That’s a lot of people.”

“I’m so fuckin’ scared, man.” I laughed -- nervous, not happy. “I’m gonna shit my pants.”

“This is a good way to do it, though,” Eddie said. “You’re keeping it simple. No rainbows, no glitter, none of that sanctimonious Dan Savage crap.”

“Right,” I said. “Just, ‘Hey, world, here’s the closet I share with my boyfriend.’”

“Well,” he said, and handed the phone back to me, “we won’t be sharing a closet after you post this.”

“True,” I said, and I laughed -- for real, this time. “Very true.”

“Also,” he said, “I need to take you shoe shopping.”

He picked up his magazine, flipped a page. Me, I just kept sitting there, ass still perched by his elbow, staring at the phone in my hand. The picture. The caption. The sure fact that my entire world would change forever as soon as I hit _Tweet_.

Eddie’s eyes darted up to mine. “Well?” he said. “Did you post it?”

“Uh,” I said. “Not yet. No.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe this isn’t actually the best time to…”

Before I could say another word, he snatched the phone out of my hand, and I watched -- mute, horrified -- as his thumb came down like a hammer. _Tweet_.

“There,” he said, handing it back to me. “Was that so hard?”

The next morning, I woke up -- _way_ too damn early -- to Eddie gently shaking my shoulder and shoving his laptop into my face.

“Richie, look,” he said. As if I could see shit without my glasses. As if the harsh blue light from the screen wasn’t just making me blinder. “I’ve got a Google Alert for your name. There’s all these articles.”

I sighed, reached for my glasses on the nightstand, squinted:

“It’s way too early for this shit,” I said. “I’m going back to bed.”

So I went back to bed. And when I woke up for real, six or seven hours later, my inbox was a fucking mess. No less than forty interview requests funneled through my publicist, plus half a dozen irate “why the fuck didn’t you tell me you had a live-in boyfriend” messages from my manager, and -- holy fuck -- an e-mail that had somehow come direct from Netflix. Would I be interested in performing an hour-long stand-up special about coming out of the closet? Would I accept compensation in the range of… Wow. Okay. Lotta zeroes after that dollar sign.

It should’ve been a no-brainer. It was more money than I’d ever seen in my life. Not quite Chappelle money, but damn close to it. I guess I was just scared, still. Going back out on the local circuit was one thing, but a marquee comedy special? A whole hour of jokes about the stuff I’d spent forty years being too chickenshit to say out loud? I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it. Not without passing out or throwing up backstage.

In the end, my manager drafted a very polite and diplomatic e-mail saying I was “definitely interested,” but going through “a period of personal upheaval” and it’d be best to “circle back in a few months.” All in all, I gave them a very firm maybe.

Course, all this was before Bev called me up that morning in the kitchen. Before me and Eddie decided to let baby make three. Before I had to think about the brand new array of bills to pay, strewn out now on the kitchen table: the gynecologist, the divorce lawyer, the very official-looking letters from the bank congratulating us on opening up some new account called… I squinted…

“Hey, Eddie?” I called out. “What’s a 529?”

Eddie strolled out of the kitchen, toting two mugs of hot tea. He set them down on the table, carefully, between the bills.

“It’s a tax-advantaged investment vehicle for future educational costs,” he said. He slid into his seat and opened his laptop. “I figured we should go with a fixed-income mutual fund for maximum stability in the event of a recession, even if money-market offers better short term returns.”

“Oh.” I blinked. I was pretty sure I’d heard the word “education” somewhere in there. “So it’s like, a college fund? For the baby?”

He sighed. “Yes, Richie.”

“Well, you could have just said that,” I said, grumpy now. “Also, I don’t know why you’re putting thousands of dollars away when it’s not even born yet.”

“Because the market is really volatile right now and --”

“It’s literally the size of a raspberry,” I interrupted.

“And do you want our little raspberry to go to college?”

“It’s a raspberry!” I said. “I don’t know what it wants!”

Eddie sighed, and spread the bills out with his fingertips. “It’s important to start saving early,” he said. “Because you never know what kind of financial calamity’s gonna hit you.”

“Oh, like what?” I said. “What could be so bad that we have to take out a savings account for a fetus?”

“Well, you might decide to divorce your wife of over two decades to take a pay cut and transfer to Chicago to move in with your boyfriend, who is a stand-up comedian, which is not a profession known for long-term financial stability, and you might also decide to adopt a baby with him and accept full financial responsibility for the mother’s health care because she’s going through a divorce of her own and most of her assets are tied up in the company she co-founded with her abusive husband.”

I didn’t say anything, not one thing, just went all quiet while he talked. And I guess he must have seen from my face that he’d hurt my feelings, because he bit his lip the way he does when he feels guilty, and he reached out and he took my hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to stress you out. Things are complicated right now, but we’ll get by.”

“I’m actually, like…” I paused, scratched absently at the side of my nose. “I’m a pretty successful comedian, Eddie. I can provide for a kid. I’m not gonna, like, lie on the couch and play video games while you bring home the bacon.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “But you’ve got to admit, comedy isn’t exactly the most stable --”

“Netflix offered me two and a half million for an hour-long special.”

He didn’t speak for a second, just blinked once, twice, and then: “Excuse me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Two point five.”

“ _When?_ ”

“A couple months ago,” I said. “After you moved in. After the shoe tweet.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do it!” I exclaimed. Eddie’s eyes were getting wide, scary wide. He was started to shake a little. “They wanted it to be all about coming out of the closet, right? And it’s hard! It’s hard for me to talk about that shit at all! Let alone get up on a stage and tell jokes about it and --”

“You told them _no_?” Every word was a gasp. “You turned down _two and a half_ \--”

“I told them maybe!” I put my hands up, defensive. “My manager e-mailed them, yeah? Said I was going through a time of, um, uh, of ‘personal upheaval,’ I think it was, and we’d circle back in a couple months.”

“So _circle! Back!_ ” Eddie almost shouted. “Oh my God, Richie! We’re having a baby! We can’t afford to turn… to turn down…”

He was starting to turn a little purple, so I didn’t want to argue. I reached for my phone with one hand, reached for Eddie’s hand with the other, gave him a reassuring, please-don’t-panic squeeze. He took a deep breath. Good. Okay. He wasn’t about to pass out. I dialed my manager, left a voicemail: “Hey, Abe? It’s Richie. Can you tell Netflix we want to go ahead with the special? Call me. Thanks.”

When I hung up, Eddie was near tears. He was still vibrating a little, taking these big, breathy gulps. I tugged him close to me, put my arms around him, wrapped him up.

“Richie,” he said, voice thin. He was having trouble talking, I could tell. “I’m… I’m so proud of…”

“Easy, baby,” I cooed, rubbing his back -- big, slow circles. “Been a big ten minutes.”

“Yeah,” he sniffled. “Sorry I freaked out.”

“Why don’t you go hop in a bubble bath, yeah? With that purple stuff I got you from that place at the mall? That’ll calm you right down.”

He pulled away from me, swiped at his wet eyes. “Okay,” he said, voice tiny. “Can… can you come?”

“Can I come take a bubble bath with you?”

He nodded.

“What, like, naked?”

He nodded again.

“Eddie,” I said, solemnly, taking his shoulders in my hands. “Does the pope shit in the woods?”


	5. Beverly, Three Months

No one was more surprised than Kay when her first book debuted at the tip-top of the New York Times Best Seller list and stayed there a good six months. You have to understand we’re talking about a genuine once-in-a-generation smash here. Oprah wanted “The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Off” for her book club. Reese Witherspoon posted the yonic pink-and-purple cover on Instagram. Hollywood producers circled like vultures to snatch up the film rights. (“I don’t see how they’re ever going to make a movie out of it,” Kay had told me around then, when she was fielding phone calls, flying out to LA. “Not unless they’re looking to premiere it on PornHub.”) Me, I’d expected nothing less. Kay had always been a star, the funniest woman I knew, far and away the best writer. About damn time the rest of the world caught up.

She had, naturally, netted a mammoth advance for a sequel, and dropped most of it on a gorgeous old Queen Anne tucked away on a quiet street in Hyde Park. I’d moved into the attic bedroom, since my old place in Kenwood was all tied up in the divorce. Eddie and Richie had offered me a guest bedroom, too, but I’d turned them down, telling them I wouldn’t want to impose. (In truth, I was less than eager to be the third wheel in their honeymoon suite.) Besides, Kay’s attic suited me. It was more like a whole apartment, really, with a little bathroom and a kitchenette and no sound at night but the branches of a willow tree skating gently across the windows. It felt like a nest, like a clubhouse, the perfect place to lie back and let this baby grow. Kay had decorated the whole house herself, painting all the walls the color of ice cream, hanging classy feminist nudes in the halls, and laying out little arid deserts of succulents on the coffee tables. At the end of the day, when I put my swollen feet up, I always took care not to poke a toe on a cactus.

“Oh, my poor baby Beverly,” Kay cooed, one night, when I’d only narrowly averted one such cactus. “Look at your feet! We need to take you in for a pedicure, stat.” 

“Please.” I snorted. “Those ladies are gonna run screaming when they see my toes. Swollen up like little cherry tomatoes.” 

“I’m sure they’ve seen worse, honey.” She lifted my feet into her lap, set to work massaging them. Her hands felt wonderful -- that cool, slow pressure. “You’re not the first pregnant lady to get her toenails painted, I’m sure.”

“But what about the chemicals?” 

“Chemicals? What chemicals?”

“There must be _something_ in nail salons that’s bad for babies,” I said, pissed, and crossed my arms over my chest -- tender today, the worst. “God knows all my other guilty pleasures are off the table. No sushi, no cookie dough, no four-times-a-day coffee…”

“No coffee?” Kay let out an honest-to-God gasp. “Why the hell not?”

“The caffeine gets in the bloodstream,” I said. “If you drink too much, it drives the baby’s heart rate up.”

“Well, shit. I got us Mexican Cokes.” Kay cut a forlorn look at the brown bags perched on the coffee table: enough Estrella Negra take-out to feed a party of four. An amount slightly less scandalous -- totally appropriate, even -- when you considered that I was, technically, eating for two. “Coke is caffeinated, right?”

“Sure is,” I said.

“Let me get you something else, then.” She slid a cushion beneath my feet -- I missed her touch right away -- and then she rose up from the couch, made her way over to her gleaming stainless-steel fridge. “I’ve got pomegranate juice, almond milk, a couple of those kale-blueberry smoothies…” 

I snorted. “When did you get so bougie, Kay McCall?”

“Around the time of my seven-figure advance, I guess,” she said, and stuck her tongue out, with a giddy, gleeful cackle. “God, Beverly, remember when we used to go dumpster diving?”

“Boy, do I.” I wrinkled my nose, recalling the smell. We’d been twenty years old, desperate and shit-broke, splitting a studio the size of a shoebox. “Real wonder we didn’t die of food poisoning.” 

“And now we’re out here drinking almond milk.” She sighed, laid a hand over her heart. “We’ve come so far, Beverly.” 

“Well, give me some of that pomegranate juice,” I said, “and we can toast to the finer things.” 

“You got it.” She tossed me a bulbous bottle of the stuff. I just barely managed to catch it. “And speaking of finer things, when are we going to talk about that _body-ody-ody_ of yours?” 

I laughed, acutely aware of how bloated I felt, how gross I must look. “‘Finer’ is not the word I’d use.” 

“But your skin, your hair, your _tits_ , Beverly,” she said, and sighed, and slumped down on the sofa next to me. “Just think about how I feel, sitting here, flat as a board, and meanwhile, my best friend…” 

“...is gonna need a whole bunch of new bras soon,” I interrupted, staring glumly down at my chest. 

“Let me take you to La Perla, then,” Kay said, resting her head on my shoulder. “I’ll spoil you rotten.”

I turned my head a little, gave her a skeptical look. “Didn’t know La Perla was in the maternity market.”

She laughed, pressed a bird-quick kiss to my cheek. “Only the best for my Beverly.” 

“Kay McCall!” I giggled. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were trying to seduce me.” 

“Oh, absolutely.” She leaned forward, grabbing at the take-out. “Who needs wining and dining when you’ve got empanadas and Mexican Coke?”

“Pass me one of those chorizo burritos, would you?” I thumped her, gentle, insistent, between the shoulders. “We’re starving over here.”

“ _We’re_ starving?”

“Yep.” I gave the small swell of my stomach a pat. “Me and my little key-lime.” 

“She’s getting so big!” Kay exclaimed, and handed me a foil-wrapped burrito. “I remember when she was the size of a sweet pea.” 

“You’re awfully confident about this baby being a ‘she,’” I said.

She shrugged. “I’ve got a good feeling.”

“You and your good feelings.”

“Just you wait, Beverly.” She pointed at me, insistent, with a half-eaten churro. “When you get a little bigger and you go in for your gender reveal, I _will_ be proven right.”

I was about to take a bite. I paused. “I’m nervous about getting bigger, actually.”

“Oh, honey,” she said, hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll take you to the mall. I’ll keep you in maternity finery.” 

“It’s not the clothes I’m worried about,” I said. “It’s more that people will be able to… you know, _know_. Just by looking at me.”

“Well, sure. The baby bump is kind of unavoidable.” 

“But if Ben and Bill see a picture of me or something, and… and I still haven’t told them that one of them is the father…” 

“Richie and Eddie are the fathers,” she said. 

“But the birth certificate…”

“Will say Richie Tozier and Eddie Kaspbrak.” 

“You know what I mean,” I said. “I have to tell Ben and Bill _something_.” 

“Actually, from a strictly legal standpoint, you don’t have to tell them shit,” Kay said. “Not while you’re pregnant, and certainly not after the baby’s born.” 

“But they’re my friends, Kay,” I said. “I love them. They love me. I don’t want to keep them in the dark.”

“Let’s do a little thought experiment, then.” Key set her burrito, her Coke, down on the coffee table. She turned to me, placed her hands on my knees. “If you were still with Ben, right now, living with him, dating him, what would you tell him?”

“If I were still with Ben, I wouldn’t be pregnant anymore,” I said. “I didn’t want kids with Ben.”

“And he would’ve been on board?”

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” I said. “I would’ve done it regardless.” I’d certainly never told Tom, two months into our marriage, that I’d missed a pill in all the hubbub over our honeymoon -- the shifting time-zones, the jet-lag. I’d just taken a cab to Planned Parenthood. 

“But for argument’s sake,” Kay said. “Ben wouldn’t have fought you on it, yeah? He wouldn’t have begged you to keep it, forced you to raise the kid with him?”

“No,” I said. “No, definitely not. That’s not like him at all.” 

“And what about Bill?” she said. “If you were absolutely certain that Bill was the father, and if Richie and Eddie weren’t in the picture, would you want to keep the baby?” 

“Of course not!” I said. “He’s married! And his wife still has no idea that I… that we…” 

“Okay, okay, let’s set all that aside for now.” She pressed her hands against my knees, bringing my attention back to the room, to her. “You would’ve gotten an abortion. Would Bill have supported you on that?”

I snorted. “He probably would have suggested it.”

“There you go.” She threw up her hands; a gesture that said, _Duh_. “They both would have supported you no matter what choice you made. These guys care about you, Beverly. They’re not going to hurt you. They’re not going to come after you. They’re going to let you make your own decisions.” 

I chewed on my lip. “You really think so? You don’t think they’ll be angry?” 

“What, angry that you’re helping Richie and Eddie start a family?”

I sighed, took a sip of my pomegranate juice. “I think Ben might’ve wanted a family with me.” 

“But you didn’t want that,” she said, lifting an eyebrow. “You just said so.”

“I don’t know what I want.” I paused, picked miserably at the label on my bottle. “And I don’t know what I was thinking, that weekend in Derry. I wasn’t really in my right mind. I mean, sleeping with both of them, not using any protection…” 

“You’d just left your piece-of-shit husband.” Her hand, again, came to rest on my shoulder. “He’d just beaten the living daylights out of you and me both. No wonder you weren’t thinking straight.”

“But I should’ve known better,” I said. I could feel myself flinching away from her, from the hand on my shoulder. I didn’t feel deserving of it, the gentle look in her eyes, her kindness. “Even with Ben, I just… I shouldn’t have jumped right into another relationship like that. But he was just so caring, and so gentle with me, and… and he reminded me of this time, this place that I really missed, and he was the total opposite of Tom, and…” I took a breath. “It seemed like a good idea. But it wasn’t. And I hurt him, I know I did. I hurt someone I really cared about, and that’s all I can ever seem to do, and…” 

I couldn’t talk anymore, so I went quiet. I brought a hand to my face, breathed deep into my palm. I wasn’t crying, not quite, but still, Kay’s arms were around me in an instant. She pulled me close, my head to her chest, and brought her lips to the crown of my head, kissed me there. 

“You’ve gotta forgive yourself, honey,” she whispered to me.

“I’m such a fucking mess,” I mumbled into her chest. 

“No, you’re not.” 

“I don’t know why you put up with me.”

“Oh, cut it out,” Kay said, and squeezed me tighter. “I love you, okay? Always have. Loved you back when we were dumpster-diving for our dinner. Love you even more now.”

I could feel myself just shrinking in her arms, surrendering to being held. I knew it couldn’t really be true, that she was only saying this stuff to make me feel better. Hadn’t she taken a beating from Tom, after all? Hadn’t I been to blame for that? And wasn’t I squatting in her house, eating her food, vomiting into her toilets every morning? I don’t know if I was especially deserving of Kay’s love, or if that’s just what she did, love people, and I happened to have fallen into her path.

“Thanks, Kay,” I managed, finally, lifting myself up, away from her. “I guess I just need a break. A break from men.”

Kay threw her head back, laughed. “You and me both, sister.” 

She let me go, then, shifted away from me on the sofa. I was, immediately, grateful for the space, and guilty that I hadn’t been able to just accept that hug, accept her love, like a normal person. As I sank into the cushions, mired in my own bullshit, she was picking up the remote. The Netflix logo was flickering to life on her widescreen. 

“What are we watching?” I asked.

“Your choice,” she said, and handed me the remote. “We can watch whatever you want.” 


	6. Eddie, Four Months

“Let’s go to Ikea,” Richie said. “It’ll be fun,” he said. 

And it _was_ fun, at least for the first few minutes, the two of us wandering wide-eyed through the nurseries. Everything -- every wall, every rug, every piece of tiny furniture -- was colored a soft pastel. The bright colors of the outside world had been dimmed for the benefit of the fragile newborn creatures who’d be sleeping in these rooms. Green became mint. Red became pink. Yellow became something pale, creamy, more fresh-churned butter than egg yolk. All the fearsome predators of the natural world were here, too, stuffed and sewn up with smiles -- teddy bears, obviously, but fuzzy-maned lions, too, and sweetly grinning alligators. It was as though the whole department were dedicated to hiding the truth:

Babies die. 

They die all the time. Preventably. Unpreventably. Sometimes for no real reason at all. I mean, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: the hell kind of diagnosis is that? When you’ve got a baby, every square inch of your home is a potential hazard. The screaming mouth of an electrical outlet, the scarlet witch-trial of a stovetop, the dangling noose that brings up the blinds. Toilets full of water. Dishwashers full of knives. Handbags full of keys and Tic Tacs and dimes small enough for curious infant fingers but far too large for tiny infant throats. Turn your back for even a second and your pride and joy might devour a Tide Pod or drown in Fluffy’s water dish or fly headfirst down the stairs or toddle into the path of a Honda Civic or touch a palm to a boiling tea-kettle or wander off hand-in-hand with a smiling stranger or follow a paper boat down a drain on a rainy day and --

“Hey, this is cute,” said Richie. I blinked. I looked at him. He was holding a teddy bear. Pink. “Maybe a little girly, though.” 

“Hmm,” I hummed. _B is for Basil, assaulted by bears_ , I thought. 

Richie must have picked up on my grimace, because he dropped the stuffed animal like a hot potato, back into the crib from whence it came.

“No, of course,” he said, like I’d actually voiced some objection to the teddy, instead of just grunting. “We should try to decorate more gender-neutral. No pink. No blue.”

“It’s fine, Rich, I don’t mind if we…” I began, and then stopped, as my eyes fell on the bear, the crib. “Wait. The blankets. All those blankets.”

“What about them?” He cast an eye down into the crib. “Oh. They’re purple. Is purple, like, homonormative, or whatever? God, I’ve got to get a handle on this shit before that chick from The Good Place screams at me on Twitter again.” 

“Blankets suffocate babies,” I said. “You’re supposed to put babies on their backs in their cribs with no blankets, no stuffed animals, so they won’t… so they don’t… because they’ll yank the fabric over their mouths and their noses and… and…”

“Eddie, hey.” His touch was light on my shoulder. I exhaled. “It’s okay. I know that. I’ve been reading all those articles you forward me. I’m not gonna put any blankets in the crib.”

“Yeah, but the store… the blankets…”

“They’re just for display.” 

“But people don’t know that!” I burst out, swung away from him. “Everybody walking around, all these pregnant women, they’ll think it’s normal! Like it’s the right thing to do! Like you’re supposed to just… just toss blankets into cribs, like that doesn’t _literally kill_ …” 

Richie’s hand interrupted me, low on my back, pressing gently, steering me away from the main artery of the showroom. (People, I was faintly aware, were staring.) We stepped into a smaller, more subdued nursery. Soft blue walls, a rocking chair the colour of a pigeon’s wing, an ottoman in the same shade. Richie guided me into the rocking chair. He sat down on the ottoman. He reached out, lightly, to rock the chair. 

“Deep breaths, Eds,” he said. “Come on. Don’t freak out.”

“I’m not freaking out,” I said, jaw tight.

“Yes, you are,” he said. “You’re having another one of your things.” 

“I am being completely reasonable.” 

“You are hollering about dead babies in an Ikea.” 

I put my head in my palms. I tried to breathe. I couldn’t even look at him. How couldn’t he see, _why_ couldn’t he see, how dangerous those blankets were? How dangerous all of this was? How much peril we were about to plunge this poor little person into? It’s hard work keeping a baby alive, damn hard work. And we were being lied to. Ikea was weaving a web of fucking lies. All these soft fabrics, gentle colors, predatory animals defanged and stuffed with cotton batting. Sure, that crib might look like a sweet little bird’s nest, but those sunshine-colored blankets would smother an infant in slumber. Little blue bodies, little mounds of brown earth, bright red blood on Ikea’s hands. 

“Hey,” Richie said. “Talk to me, man.”

“It’s just… There’s just…” I began, and stopped. I could barely speak. “There’s so much that could go wrong.”

“Yeah, but we’ve got this.” Richie’s hand squeezed my knee, gentle, reassuring. “Our kid’s going to be extra badass. Pure, unadulterated clown-slayer blood. Don’t forget.” 

I lowered my hands, cut a glare at him. “This isn’t a joke, Rich.” 

“I’m not joking! I promise! In fact, you know what? I more-than-promise. I _swear._ ” He laid a hand over his breastbone, lifted the other, thumb over the palm like a Boy Scout. “I, Richard Tozier, do solemnly swear that I will never permit my offspring to play in a sewer, nor to engage in combat with any sort of clown, murderous or just regular type…”

“Don’t,” I said to him. My hands were shaking now; not a good sign. “Please don’t. I know you’re trying to make me laugh, but please, please, just…” 

“Hey, Eddie. Hey.” His hands came down, once more, to my jittering knees. He tried, unsuccessfully, to still them. “Your mom --”

“What did I _just_ say about jokes?”

“I’m not making a joke!” Richie said, almost pleaded. “I’m just thinking about when we were little, yeah? And your mom, like… she made you think you were sick, right? When you weren’t. She was always going on about how you were so fragile, and you had weak lungs, and you couldn’t...” 

“I am _nothing_ like her,” I said. “I am _not_ making shit up.” 

“Can you let me finish my...”

“There are _real_ dangers out there,” I said, and I was shaking now, all over, because he didn’t understand, and I needed him, desperately, to understand. “There are real things that could really kill our baby.” 

“You think I don’t know that?” Richie said, a little testily. “If you listen to what I’m actually…”

“Please just be quiet,” I said, pushing him away, rocking back in the chair -- oh, _worst_ idea; surge of nausea, funny heat, all over, so dizzy, stomach roiling. Richie was up in an instant, reaching for me. I batted him away. “Don’t… I can’t…”

“Eddie,” he said -- no longer pissed, but soft, a little scared. “Sweetheart, you’re having a panic attack.” 

I lurched forward, and he lifted me up, out of the chair, his hands beneath my armpits, like I weighed nothing, like I was a little kid. “Lean against me,” he said, “like this,” and I did, sloughing my weight into his side, letting him walk for the both of us. “Come on. Let’s find you a nice, soft mattress so you can lie down.” 

I kept my eyes on the floor. I tried to breathe. Faintly, I heard a voice in a pair of royal-blue pants call out, “Sir, do you need medical attention?” and I heard Richie answer, “We’ve got it, thanks.” Every step, every breath, was agony. When I finally saw the corner of a mattress in my periphery, my relief was so total that I moaned out loud. 

Richie helped me lie down -- one hand between my shoulders, one supporting the bend in my knees, like I was some incontinent old man in a nursing home. He propped the pillows. He asked me if I needed more of them, or if he could grab me a blanket. I loved him, I remembered. I’d loved him since Neibolt, the bright pain in my broken arm, the monster closing in, and his hands cool on my face, pulling my gaze toward him, begging, “Look at me.” Now, like then, I looked at him, even though the lights were too loud, too white. He put his hand on my cheek. “Breathe, baby,” he said, from his perch on the edge of the mattress, and I did. “In,” he said, and waited, counting under his breath: _one, two, three, four_. “Out.” He knew exactly what to do.

This had happened before with him, a few times, including the night we’d first undressed in front of each other. I’d thought I would be able to handle it. We’d talked about it a lot, worked our way up to it. And we’d moved slowly, too, that night, like the world’s worst strip poker players: a sock here, a necktie there, until I was, at last, pulling my briefs down before him. I’d bent to lift my ankles up, out of the fabric, and then I’d stood. Naked. Completely naked. Not a stitch to shield me from Richie’s eyes sweeping over my body, my scars, my penis. I’d realized, suddenly, that I was erect, that I was _leaking_ , and then I’d felt ashamed, and then I’d felt that dizziness, those waves of nauseous heat. 

I’d told him I needed to lie down. He’d helped me to our bed. Then, horror of horrors, he’d climbed into it with me, wrapped my naked body up in his own. And before I could tell him to back the fuck off, to stop fucking touching me, he’d crossed his arms over my racing heart, pressed his closed fists on either side, like sentinels. “Breathe, baby,” he’d whispered. “Just breathe.”

“Can you cuddle me?” I asked him now, cheek pressed to the bare grey mattress. “The way you did last time?”

Richie’s hand, tracing through my hair, hesitated. “I would, but…”

“But what?”

“We’re in public.”

I could’ve cried. “I don’t care,” I said. “Please, just…”

“Okay,” he said, “okay,” and he rounded the mattress and climbed up onto it, behind me, pulled me close to him, the way he’d held me that night. It took me a minute to get comfortable -- his zipper was digging into the base of my spine -- but after a moment, I settled into his arms, against his body, near enough to feel his chest rise and fall against my back. 

“I’m sorry,” I said, when my breaths were even, when I was able to speak. “I’m such a basketcase.”

“No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re going to be such a good dad. I can’t wait to raise this kid with you. I can’t wait to babyproof the living shit out of our apartment.” 

I laughed; I felt him laugh, too, a hot breath of wind against the curve of my neck. 

“There we go,” he said. “Made you laugh.” 

“You always do,” I said.

“Not always,” he said. “Not when you’re in one of your moods.” 

“Oh, so now you’re picking on the invalid?” I said. “Mocking me while I’m still fragile?” 

“You’re not fragile,” he said. “You’re tough as shit.” He paused. “I just think it would be good for you to look into, like, seeing a therapist, or --”

“Excuse me? Hi.”

An intruder; a woman’s voice. I lifted my head from the mattress. I was expecting a blue-shirted employee, a stern manager asking us to stop spooning on the mattress, but what I saw was much worse. This was a straight woman, I realized, with a cold snap of terror. A straight woman in a paisley blouse, blond bangs tucked behind her ear, holding the hand of an equally blond child. He stared at us with watery blue eyes. He sucked his thumb. He stepped forward, and she tugged him back, as if on a leash, away from us.

“I don’t mean to interrupt whatever this is.” She paused, chewed on her lip. “I just really wanted to come over here and --”

“Hey, fuck you, lady,” I spat. I veered out of Richie’s arms. “It’s 20-fucking-20. We’ve got every fucking right to --”

“Oh, no, no, no,” she said, hands flying up, eyes going wide. “I don’t have a problem with -- I wasn’t going to -- Oh, gosh, you thought that I --” 

“No, no! Speak up!” I could feel Richie clawing at me, trying to pull me back; I swatted his hands away. “Sounds like you’ve got a lot to say, you fucking bi--”

“My brother!” She chirped. “My brother is gay!” 

I heard Richie, behind me, say, out loud, “Oh my God.” 

“Last Thanksgiving! He showed up with, um… with his… his partner, I guess you’d call it,” she stammered. “And of course, Spencer here had a lot of questions about the whole, you know, lifestyle.” A tug on the blond child’s arm. “So we’re always looking for teachable moments.” 

I blinked. “...Sorry?”

“I just wanted to ask if, um…” She paused, tugged the dangling strap of her purse up and over her shoulder. “If you knew of any, like, children’s books? Or other resources? That we could use with Spencer?” 

“Oh. I’m not sure.” I was faintly aware of Richie shifting away from me, hiding his face in the mattress but not quite managing to disguise the gales of laughter racking his body. “You could try, uh... Google?” 

“Right, of course,” she said. “We’ll do that. So sorry to bother you.” She stepped away from us, squeezed her kid’s hand again. Her other arm flew up, into the air, made a fist. “Love is love!” 

“I’m gonna die,” Richie said, voice blurred with laughter, muffled by the mattress. “I’m gonna piss my pants right here on this mattress and we’re going to have to pay full price for it.”

I elbowed him in the ribs, muttered in the lowest voice I could manage, “She’s still within earshot.” 

He rose up from the mattress, nudged his glasses up his nose, dabbed at the gloss of tears beneath his eyes. 

“You were, like…” He paused, dissolved once more into helpless laughter. “ _Excuse me for living, Anita Bryant_.” 

His impression of me was getting awfully good.

“Let’s go home.” I scowled. “My head hurts.” 

“Love is love!” he crowed, lifting a fist in the air. I almost slapped him. 


	7. Richie, Five Months

Our toast -- _to Richie’s first show back!_ \-- was ecstatic, and messy as a car crash: Kay’s margarita, my whiskey on ice, and Bev’s totally non-alcoholic cranberry soda, which she nonetheless threw back like she was shotgunning a beer at a high-school bonfire. Eddie wasn’t here, and neither was his usual order: just water, thank you, room temp, with a wedge of lemon, and filtered, not sparkling. He’d flat-out refused to come and watch me headline at one o’clock in the morning. He’d been all like, “I need my ten hours, Richie, you know how I get when I’m up too late,” and I was like, “What if I promise to take you to the gift shop at the hospital before my set?” and he was like, “What? Why?” and I was like, “So you can ball out on Willow Tree Angels,” and then he’d swatted me with a tea towel and hollered at me to leave him the fuck alone about his fuckin’ Willow Tree Angels, for fuck’s sake, it was a free fuckin’ country and it wasn’t against the fuckin’ law to collect fuckin’ non-denominational figurative fuckin’ sculptures.

I love him. I do. I just love messing with him, too.

So, anyway, it was just me and Bev and Kay that night, posted up at a table in the back of this tiny 150-seat club, nursing drinks and shooting the shit between opening sets. Bev had to work pretty hard to persuade Kay to come along -- the Trashmouth brand wasn’t exactly in line with her whole progressive feminist ethos -- but we were all having a decent time, I thought. Getting along just fine. I was all loose from the liquor and I’d just run my routine through one last time in the mirror in the men’s room. I was feeling good. Ready to go.

“Okay, guys, remember,” I told the girls, as the clock ticked toward one o’clock. “Don’t laugh unless my jokes are actually funny. I want the room to be honest with me. So if there’s a lull? If folks are quiet? Don’t start laughing just to fill the empty space. Capiche?”

“Aww, that’s okay, buddy.” Kay slapped me between my shoulders. “You don’t need to tell _me_ not to laugh.”

I pointed at her, grinned. “I _will_ make you laugh tonight, Hillary Rodham,” I said. “Mark my words.”

Bev giggled. “You know, Richie, the first time I told Kay that you and I had been friends back in the day, she was all, ‘Really? _That_ chauvinistic asshole?’”

“Okay, I did not say ‘asshole,’” Kay said, hands up, defensive. “I specifically said ‘dick.’”

“Has a better ring to it,” Bev agreed. “ _Chauvinistic dick_. There’s some nice assonance there.”

“Well, listen, I’m a new man,” I said, because I really believed I was one. “You’ve never seen a Trashmouth set like this before. Just you wait.”

Bev took a measured sip of her cranberry soda. “This is the first routine you’ve written all by yourself in a while, isn’t it, Richie?

“ _Shh_.” I leaned in, pressed a finger to my lips; Bev giggled. “They don’t know that,” I whispered. “But, yeah. Written by yours truly. One hundred percent.”

It was God’s honest truth, and it had been way tougher than anyone knew. Over the past few months, as the Netflix taping loomed closer and closer, I’d spent more hours than I could count hunched in front of my beaten-up old laptop, typing up jokes and deleting them and re-writing them with the words switched around. I’d spent just as many hours in front of the full-length mirror by our closet, trying out new voices, new faces, new outfits, even. It wasn’t like I’d never worked solo before -- hello, I’d been a no-name hitting open mics for years before I was anywhere big enough to afford co-writers -- but still, I was rusty. This was the first material I’d written by myself in years. I didn’t know how good I felt about it. Wouldn’t know until I tried it out, really. There was a real chance that I’d bomb, and bomb hard.

Not to mention this would be the first time I’d ever told gay jokes. Seriously. I’d gotten into deep shit many times in my career, with many different groups: with women, with black people, with old people, with little people, with Catholics and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists (and oh my _God_ , with Scientologists, those people are fucking scary, real shit), with deaf people, blind people, and deaf-blind people, with Native Americans, with vegans, with Asians, with Jameela Jamil. And I’d be the first to tell you that I deserved all the blowback I ever got from those people. Except for the Scientologists, obviously. Fuck those guys. Oh, oh, and this one time, the National Federation of Italian-American Societies got on my ass. Which, like, what the fuck, right? It’s the twenty-first fucking century. You’re not the huddled masses yearning to breathe free at Ellis Island anymore, losers. I’m not oppressing you with my bit about Giancarlo Giacomo, the guido gigolo with a spray-tan addiction and a coterie of MILFs and a cock like a _venti_ salami. That was a good bit. A damn good bit. I will never apologize for that bit.

Sorry. Got sidetracked. Here’s my point: I’d been canceled on countless occasions over the course of my illustrious career, but never, not once, had I pissed off the gays. Seriously. Never told even a single gay joke. Gay marriage was legalized? Nothing. Caitlyn Jenner came out? Not a word. A gay man with the word “Butt” in his surname ran for president? I kept my trap shut and I maxed out my donations to Bernie Sanders. In hindsight, anyone who was paying close attention should have connected the dots. Gay stuff was the one and only thing I never joked about. I was _that_ terrified to touch it. Was I even capable of telling a decent gay joke? No idea. Guess I was about to find out.

“Hey, man,” said a voice I didn’t recognize. “Thanks for coming out.”

I turned my head, took the guy in. Tallish, bushy beard, Pickle Rick on the t-shirt. I did the mental math and figured he had to be straight. So when he said “coming out,” he must mean it literally. As in, “Thank you for coming out to the Laugh Lounge this evening to deliver stand-up unto us.” This guy was not about to start weeping about how much I’d done for the gays, which had happened a few times now, in these run-ins with fans. I never really felt like I deserved it. I hadn’t really done all that much for the cause. I mean, I’d sucked a lot of dick, sure, but I wouldn’t call myself an activist or anything.

So, anyway, I said, “Thanks. Been a while. Hope I’m not too rusty.”

“Rusty? No way, man.” The dude beamed. “Never seen a set I didn’t love. I listen to the ‘Bitches Ain’t Shit’ monologue on your live album all the time, man.”

I winced. I was very aware of Kay’s side-eye. “Cool,” I said. “Thanks for the support, dude. Hope you enjoy the show.”

I turned back to the table, hoped he’d take that as his cue to leave. No such luck. “And who are _these_ lovely ladies?” he said. Shit.

“I’m a friend of Richie’s,” Bev said, faking friendliness the way she did around guys like this one. “We’ve known each other since middle school.”

“That’s crazy,” said the guy. “What are you drinking? Cool if I buy you another one?”

“Really, man?” Kay cut in, no longer satisfied to just silently judge the shit out of this guy. “You’re hitting on a pregnant woman?” She laughed. “By offering to buy her a fucking drink _?_ ”

“Oh, I didn’t…” He stammered, stepping back. “I didn’t realize…” His eyes wandered down, to the slight swell of Bev’s belly. “Right. Yeah. Sorry about that. I, um…”

“God, I can just smell the class wafting off of you.” Kay laughed. Then she did something really fucking weird: she slung her arm around Bev’s shoulder. “Why don’t you just buzz off and let me and my wife enjoy our night, yeah?”

The guy looked pissed, mumbled something under his breath -- I didn’t catch it, but it sure sounded rude; might have started with a D and ended with an S and contained the letters Y, K, and E in the middle -- and then he shuffled off.

But not before Kay leaned in and pressed a kiss to Bev’s temple.

...Whoa.

I looked at Bev. She was blushing, lifting a hand to brush her bangs out of her eyes as she took another sip of her cranberry soda. She laughed, but not the way she usually laughed. No, this was the way you laugh when you like someone. Like, _like-like_ them. And you don’t want them to know it. Very dainty, you know. Very restrained. That flirty little giggle.

And then she caught me staring, and then she looked away from me, down at the floor, and oh, God, I know I said she was blushing before, but now? Her skin was as pink as her drink. Must suck to be a redhead. You can’t hide shit.

“Did I miss something?” I glanced over at Kay, who was, like, totally untroubled, just chewing on an ice cube without a care in the world. “Are you two, like… together?”

Bev yelped, “No!” I mean, really _yelped_ it, shrill and scared as a shelter dog. Kay, meanwhile, stared at me like I had three heads. “That’s the oldest trick in the book,” she said. “Some loser’s hitting on you and you want him to fuck off? Grab your girlfriend and tell the guy she’s your _girlfriend_.”

“What do you mean, ‘oldest trick in the book?’” I said. “You guys have done this before? Like, pretended to be lesbians, or whatever?”

“Oh, all the time,” Kay said, with a confident sip of her margarita. “And it works, too. Except when the guy’s like, ‘I don’t believe it! Prove it!’ because then he just wants to watch you make out and shit.”

“Come on, Kay,” Bev said, dabbing at her mouth with a napkin. The faintest impression came away, a pink blot in the shape of her mouth. “Richie doesn’t want to hear about this stuff.”

“Hey, don’t speak for me,” I said. “I’m _very_ curious about all this making out and shit.”

“Honestly, I feel badly about it.” Bev frowned, chewed on her lip. “It’s pretty homophobic, Kay. We should cut it out. Feeds into this whole thing of straight women kissing their friends for fun.”

“But it _is_ fun,” said Kay. “You admit that it’s fun.”

I looked at Bev. She looked at her drink. There was this weird tension simmering in the air between all of us. Something was going on, something strange. I didn’t know the fuck what. I would have sat there a while longer, interrogating them, but it was just about time for me to go on. So I stood up and I said, “Okay, then. Enjoy the show, lesbos,” and Bev cried out, “We’re not --” and Kay threw her head back and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Now, I don’t want to bore you by telling you what I said up on stage that night and stopping every five seconds to tell you that the audience laughed or I walked across the stage or whatever the fuck, so I’ll just tell you exactly what I said, and then I’ll tell you why I stopped saying it.

Here we go.

“Hey, Laugh Lounge? What’s up? Thank you, thank you. Yeah, it’s been a minute, hasn’t it? Been a long-ass minute. You want to know exactly how long it’s been? Last time I was here, I opened with a joke about my girlfriend. Yeah. Exactly. My girlfriend who didn’t exist. This time, though? Get ready to hear a shit-ton of jokes about my boyfriend. Yes! My boyfriend! Thank you! Thank you! Aww, come on, sit down. Go on. Sit down. But yes. Yeah. We’re very happy together. Thank you. Best sex of my life. Thank you. Yes. I’m getting laid. Thank you. Every night. It’s great. I do not miss the motherfucking closet.

I will say this, though. I’ll just say this. I was damn good at being in the closet. Like, world champ. Easy. You know how with some guys, there’s like, rumors? You’ll hear whispers? ‘Oh, he’s just hooking up with that famous actress for PR. He’s _really_ dating his manager.’ Not me, baby. Anytime I ever heard a rumor about me, it was like, ‘He gets drunk and passes out at strip clubs.’ And those rumors? Were true. Yes. All true. I was definitely getting very drunk and passing out in a lot of strip joints. _Female_ strip joints, let’s be clear. Yeah, I was so focused on the liquor menu at these places that I completely ignored the strippers. That’s me, baby. Reading Playboy for the articles. Going to Hooters for the food. Watching Game of Thrones for the plot. Just kidding. I only watch Game of Thrones to get 49 to 55 minutes of untroubled sleep.

I’ll tell you what, though: gay or straight, at the end of the day, all of us guys are spending hundreds of dollars to watch some girl dance around in a leotard. The only difference between a Lady Gaga show and Friday night at Rick’s Cabaret? Guys get their dicks out at Rick’s Cabaret. So really, like, in a way, that’s where you want to be if you’re gay. Like, you’re in the closet, you want to look at some dicks without anyone suspecting a thing? Hit the strip club, man. Hit the strip club, but keep your eyes on the audience. There’s a dancer sliding down the pole, but you’re not looking at her. You’re looking past her. You’re like, ‘Damn, that guy’s _huge_.’

Hey, speaking of huge dicks, isn’t it weird that --”

“Enough with the faggot shit!”

It was a lone voice, faint and far away, booming from the back row. I stopped talking. I heard a boo, and then another, and then a whole chorus of them, and then the voice again: “What? He’s a faggot. He’s literally a faggot.”

I should have hit him with some sick comeback and just kept going. I really should have. That’s what a better comedian would have done, anyway. But in the moment, standing up there, watching the crowd lurch into chaos, listening to the roar of a fight breaking out, I could barely breathe, let alone talk. I tried to clear my throat, tried to move along to the next joke, but the next joke was about sucking dick. The next five minutes of jokes were all about sucking dick. I’d planned out this whole bit where I’d mime it, pretend to start choking, do the Heimlich on myself. And it had seemed funny when I was getting it ready, but now, all I could think about was Henry Bowers, decades ago, red in the face, baring his crooked brown teeth, spitting _get the fuck out of here faggot_. And then I wasn’t even on that stage anymore. Not really. I was a knock-kneed little kid again. I was shaking in my sneakers on the second floor of the Neibolt House and Pennywise was torturing me with visions of Eddie, sick. Eddie, dying. Eddie, vomiting slick black oil. Everybody else had normal fears: spiders, ghosts, monsters. But I was scared of being unloved, and just as scared of being in love, and so, basically, I was scared all the time. I was. I really was. I was scared to even touch my friends, scared of what I felt for them. Scared of the cavalcade of butterflies in my stomach when I rode on the back of Bill’s bicycle with the wind in my hair and my arms around his chest. Scared at Stan’s bar mitzvah, watching him tall and regal in his wool suit, hypnotized by the musical Hebrew coming out of his mouth. Scared of everything I didn’t feel when Bev stripped down to her training bra that weekend at the quarry. And scared, truly scared shitless, by the sure knowledge that I was in love with Eddie. That I wanted to hold him in my arms, trace my hands through his hair, kiss him. That I dreamed about kissing him, but that I thought about it, too. When I was awake. On purpose.

So, yeah, the spiders, the ghosts, the monsters, they didn’t scare me. I’d killed a monster. I’d lived. But a boy who likes boys is a dead boy. I didn’t need Pennywise to tell me that. Boys like me got beaten to death. Boys like me got tied to trucks and dragged along country roads and left to rot in the dust and horseshit. Boys like me got sick and died and nobody came to their funerals.

So I stayed quiet. I went to strip clubs. I drank myself stupid. I had a lot of sex I didn’t want to have. I got up on stages and I stared out into paying audiences and I lied and I lied and I lied and I…

Stage. Right. I was standing on a stage. Standing there shooting a thousand-yard stare into a crowd that was starting to look like one big fistfight.

I said, “Give me a sec, folks.”

And then I bolted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can't believe it only took me seven chapters to start interpolating Siken into Richie's internal monologue.


	8. Beverly, Six Months

I’d been pregnant six months, which was time enough to tell me that my situation was unconventional in the extreme. I was very often the only single lady at my Lamaze classes, except when Kay tagged along and allowed everyone to assume that she was my lesbian lover. (Why she got such a kick out of that, I’d never understand.) Strangers on the street would ask me if I’d decided on a name yet, and they were invariably baffled when I explained it was none of my business what the kid would be called. And anytime I went anywhere with Eddie, folks assumed he was my husband. He never failed to rip into them, hollering about their retrograde assumptions until they skittered away, muttering fearful apologies. It never bothered me quite as much -- I mean, why wouldn’t people assume that a man out and about with a pregnant woman were husband and wife? That was the norm, after all. And we all fell so far outside of said norm that explaining ourselves was damn near impossible. The world just wasn’t built for us.

And neither, by the way, was Dr. Gupta’s neo-natal clinic. Whoever designed the place hadn’t left much room for spectators. A husband could tag along comfortably enough to watch over his wife, sure, but my six-month sonogram was standing room only: Dr. Gupta manning the scanner, Kay hovering over my shoulder, Richie stooping to peer at the screen, and Eddie pacing the brief length of the room, practically vibrating out of his skin with nervous energy. Richie had to loop an arm around him to keep him still as Dr. Gupta swept her wand across my stomach and the little creature inside me stirred to life in grainy grayscale.

“Wow,” Richie breathed. “It looks just like Eraserhead.” 

“How dare you!” I laughed. “I’ve made a perfectly fine fetus.” 

“Or some kind of alien,” Richie continued. “I’m definitely picking up an extraterrestrial feel.” 

“This is exactly how I always imagined seeing my firstborn,” Eddie sighed, curling into Richie’s side. “Standing next to my gay life partner, listening to him go, ‘Wow, this is just like Eraserhead.’”

“He’s getting really good at sarcasm,” Richie announced to the small room. “I’m rubbing off on him.”

“Oh, I’m sure you are.” Kay grinned, socking Richie in the side. “But pipe down about your sex life, would you? There are children present.” 

Dr. Gupta looked up from the screen. “You all seem to be great friends,” she said, and smiled. “How’d you meet? Through a surrogacy agency?”

“Oh, no, no,” I said. “I’ve known Richie and Eddie since we were kids.”

“We go back about thirty years,” Richie confirmed.

“Oh, wow!” Dr. Gupta seemed genuinely surprised by this news. “And you wanted a friend to be your surrogate! That’s lovely.” 

“Well, actually, she came to us,” Richie said, “after this one weekend when we all met up, like, back in our hometown, for this reunion type of thing, and she and one of our other friends -- well, actually, _two_ of our other friends --” 

Eddie interrupted, quick: “T.M.I., Rich.”

“What? What’d I do?” Richie looked around, bewildered. “I’m just trying to provide basic medical background here.” 

“Can we know the sex?” Kay, mercifully, interrupted, before Richie could finish telling Dr. Gupta what a whore I’d been that weekend. “Boy or girl?” 

Dr. Gupta nodded, and she’d just begun to dip her wand lower on my belly, angling for a better view, when Richie said, “Actually, I think we’d rather wait, if that’s okay,” and Eddie cut in, “Well, if we know whether it’s a boy or a girl, we can start to think about names,” and Richie answered, “Weren’t we just gonna name the baby Stanley regardless?” and, well, then I couldn’t keep my mouth shut anymore.

“No. Absolutely not.” I lifted my head, eyes on Richie, glared at him. “I am not enduring nine months of heartburn and back pain and no nicotine just so you can name this baby Stanley.” 

“What, we’re not allowed to pay tribute to Stan the Man?”

“Not if this baby’s a girl, you’re not.”

“And why the hell not?” Richie looked pissed. “He was a loyal friend, an expert birdwatcher, a devout Jew…”

“Stanley,” Eddie said, “is _not_ a girl’s name.”

“Yes, it is,” said Richie.

Eddie was adamant. “There has never, ever been a girl named Stanley.”

“Barack Obama’s mom was named Stanley,” said Richie, in his know-it-all voice.

Eddie squinted at Richie, baffled. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Just checked Wikipedia,” said Kay, eyes darting up from the ultra-bright screen of her phone. “‘Stanley Ann Dunham was an American anthropologist who specialized in the economic anthropology and rural development of Indonesia. She was the mother of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States.’” 

Richie crossed his arms over his broad chest. He smiled, smug, at Eddie. 

“Shut up,” said Eddie.

“I didn’t say anything,” said Richie.

“I _said_ , shut up.”

“You can’t tell me to shut up if I didn’t say anything.”

“I am not naming my daughter Stanley,” said Eddie. 

“Thank you,” I said. 

“Isn’t this fight a little premature?” said Kay. “I mean, you guys don’t even know if you’re having a daughter.” 

“Hey, you’re the one with the ‘hunches.’” I hooked my fingers in the air, miming quotation marks. “You call the baby ‘she’ all the time.”

“Kay’s hunches are not scientific data,” Eddie said, and just as I began to worry that we were about to get genuinely mean with one another, Dr. Gupta raised her hand. She waved. 

“If I may,” she said -- very graciously, given we’d all been ignoring her and bickering for the last five minutes, “I’ve noticed a slight abnormality in the baby’s heart rate.”

Well, that shut us up. The mood in the room, jocular just seconds ago, became abruptly grim as hell. I followed Dr. Gupta’s index finger to the black, blurry chamber of the baby’s heart. At least, I thought, it was still beating. Expanding. Collapsing. Packing up blood and mailing it out through each and every tiny vessel. 

“I’ve noticed a few brief episodes of bradycardia,” she said. “That just means the baby’s heart rate has been dipping below 110 beats per minute -- which, ideally, is as low as it should go.”

“Okay,” I said, and tucked a stray, sweaty lock of hair behind my ear. “And how worried should we be?”

“Well, fetal arrythmias do affect about 2% of pregnancies,” she said.

“Wait, that’s fucking substantial,” said Richie. “What the fuck?”

“So this is... normal?” I tried to keep the fear out of my voice. “Is that what you’re saying? 

To my extreme dismay, Dr. Gupta shook her head. “I wouldn’t say it’s normal, no,” she said. “Especially in pregnancies like yours, where we’ve got a mother of advanced age.” 

“Okay, forty is _not_ an ‘advanced age,’” said Kay, her voice tight, focused, full of anger. It was the exact same way she spoke to construction workers when they whistled at me on the street. “Like, this isn’t the 1800s. Women actually like to live a little before they have kids, and Beverly is an extraordinarily successful professional in her field, and --”

“Kay,” said Eddie, his jaw tight, “just let the doctor talk.”

“No, no, I agree,” I said. “Don’t call me old.”

“My apologies.” Dr. Gupta put her hands up, the way you might _down, boy_ a rowdy dog. I couldn’t say I loved her body language. Or maybe it was just some hormonal thing, making me feel all judgy. “With… let’s say… mothers of your age, we can often run into unforeseen complications. So we’ll have to be very careful, especially now that you’re moving into the last trimester.”

“Oh, of course,” I said. “I’ve been on my very best behavior, I promise you.” It was true. I hadn’t tasted sushi in months. Not cookie dough, not vodka, not the sharp tang of nicotine, which I truly missed. How soon after the delivery would I get to light into a pack of Camels? I thought about it all the time. I was thinking about it then, in fact, as Eddie lifted his head and raised his hand, like he wanted to be called on in class.

“But the bradycardia,” he said. “Are we talking about transient sinus bradycardia, or do you think this is an underlying structural issue? Because if there’s even a chance that this could be LQTS, I want to order an ECG as soon as possible. Like, today, if we can.” 

“How… how do you…” Dr. Gupta peered, mystified, at Eddie. “Didn’t you say you worked in finance?” 

“He reads a lot of WebMD,” said Richie, apologetic. “I can’t figure out how to block it on his laptop.”

“Well, excuse the fuck out of me for educating myself about the well-being of our future child,” Eddie huffed. It may have just been the low light, but I couldn’t help but think he looked awfully pale. “ _Somebody_ has to.” 

“To answer your question,” said Dr. Gupta, fully ignoring Eddie’s little outburst, “what I’ve observed today are very short stints of a slower heart rate, less than one or two minutes each, which typically does point to transient sinus bradycardia.”

“Which means?” I asked, unfamiliar myself with the subtleties of WebMD.

“Which means it’s most likely just due to the nervous system being underdeveloped at this stage.”

“Underdeveloped?” Eddie’s brows flew nearly as high as his hairline. “So now we’re talking about brain damage?”

“No, no, no.” Dr. Gupta shook her head, rapid. “I’m sorry. I should have said that the nervous system _is_ developing, and as it develops, we do occasionally see very brief episodes of bradycardia. It’s just the heart learning to interact with the sympathetic nerv--”

“Sorry,” Eddie said, lifting a hand, waving it vaguely at Dr. Gupta, “sorry,” and then he just bolted, flinging the door open so hard it smacked into the wall and sent the room rattling. Richie was after him in a second, tailing him out into the hallway. A moment later, I heard a retch. A faint splatter of liquid on linoleum. 

I heard Richie’s voice say, “Oh, Eddie, honey, no.” 

Dr. Gupta rose from her stool. “I’m just going to step out,” she said. “Make sure he’s all right.” 

“No, no.” I reached out, tugged on her white coat, trying to hold her back. I liked Dr. Gupta, mostly. I didn’t want her to wind up on the receiving end of one of Eddie’s tantrums. “Just give them a minute. Eddie’s pretty worked up about the baby, and I think, um…” I paused, scratched at my nose. “I think it’s just hard for him to hear that anything might go wrong.” 

“Of course,” Dr. Gupta said, and returned to her seat. “In the meantime, why don’t I take a look at the fetus’s movements? And your amniotic fluid, too. That should tell us whether we need to order an echocardiogram.” 

“Sure,” I said. “Sounds like a plan.” 

I lifted my arms as Dr. Gupta brought her wand down on my stomach once more. For just a second, I found myself angry with Eddie. Why did he get to panic and run out and puke while I had to lie here naked from the waist down and keep it together? Why did he have a boyfriend to look after him and love him while I’d somehow washed up on the beach of my fortieth birthday all alone? I mean, sure, this wasn’t my kid, but it _was_ my body. Giving birth at my _advanced age_ wasn’t exactly a low-risk proposition. There were times when I did want to panic, times when I wondered if I was doing the right thing, if I shouldn’t have just gone out and gotten that abortion after all. And this moment, right here, right now, listening to Richie and Eddie’s voices filtering bellicose through the thin walls, watching the grim line of Dr. Gupta’s mouth as she peered at the ultrasound monitor -- this was one of those times. 

“...Fine, I’m fine, I swear,” Eddie was saying, far away, out in the hallway. “I’m sorry. I’ll clean this up.”

“Eds, you should talk to someone about this.”

“Not now, Rich. Please. I’m not in the fucking mood.”

“Can we get a glass of water?” Richie said, raising his voice. “Can someone get my, uh… partner a glass of water?”

“You’re not supposed to drink anything right after you puke,” said Eddie.

“Says who?” said Richie.

As they argued, Dr. Gupta set her wand down on the counter and peeled off her latex gloves. “So her movements are normal,” she said, “and your amniotic fluid looks --”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “Her?”

Her eyes went wide; she clapped a hand over her mouth. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You asked, earlier, about the baby’s sex, but then we got sidetracked with this cardiac issue, and…”

“Knew it,” Kay said, and rattled my shoulder. “I’m never, ever wrong.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, and reached up, squeezed her hand. “Don’t get cocky.” 

There was something morbid about the set of Dr. Gupta’s face. “I know you didn’t want to know the baby’s gender just yet,” she said, and repeated: “I’m so sorry.”

“Hey, it’s fine,” I said, and angled a thumb at the door, the hallway. “Just as long as the dads don’t know. Your secret’s safe with me.” 

“Okay,” she said, and rose from her stool. “As I was saying, even though her movements and your amniotic fluid do look normal, I’m going to order a fetal ECG just to be on the safe side.”

“Right,” I said. “Make sure we’re not dealing with something serious.”

“I’ll be back,” she said, and dipped out into the corridor, and closed the door behind her, leaving Kay and I behind in a calm, dark, quiet, the baby girl on the screen the only light for us to see by. 

Kay lifted her hand, stroked a sweaty strand of red hair out of my eyes. “I think you owe me five bucks,” she said, “seeing as we just got official confirmation that she’s a she.”

“Hey, Kay?” I saw what she was trying to do -- distract me -- and I appreciated it, I did, but I really wasn’t in the mood to joke around. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” she said. 

A pause. The baby’s heart beating steadily in the still space.

“Am I doing the right thing?” I said, my voice small. 

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, Eddie’s freaking out,” I said. “And he and Richie… I don’t know, it just feels like they’re fighting all the time these days.”

“Well, you knew it was a bold move, giving them the baby,” Kay sighed, and leaned her head on my shoulder. “You knew they’d only been together for a month and change.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t see them in Derry.” I had to make her believe what I knew to be true about Richie and Eddie, about the thing they had. “That weekend, out there on the water, in the quarry, it was like… I mean, they were clinging to each other like they’d just been shipwrecked. Holding one another like nothing else, no one, mattered. For dear life. I mean, I looked at them and I just… I knew, I _knew_ , that they’d be together forever.”

Kay’s voice, measured, the very opposite of my hormonal rambling: “Maybe they will be.” 

“But now, you know, they keep having all these arguments…” 

“They argue like they’ve been married fifty years, though,” she said. “I’d be more worried if you handed the baby over while they were still in that lovey-dovey honeymoon phase.” 

“What if they break up?” I said, aware even as I said it that this wasn’t reason talking, but the pure fear I felt. “What if they don’t want the baby anymore?”

“Then you’ll give the baby to someone else,” Kay said. “There’s no shortage of people out there dying to be parents.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I cut my eyes away from her. “My time in foster care says otherwise.”

“Well, then, hell,” she said, “worst comes to worst, I’ll help you raise it. Like some hippie commune. Two old spinsters and their baby girl and no men in the picture.” 

“You know,” I said, turning to face her, so close our noses brushed a little, “that sounds kind of nice.”

“Doesn’t it?” 

“The two old spinsters and no men part,” I said. “The kid part sounds just as odious as ever.”

She giggled, leaned forward, touched her nose to mine.

“This’ll all work out,” she said, in a low voice. “You know how I know?”

“How?”

“I’ve got a hunch,” she said. “And I haven’t been wrong yet.” 

“Now, what’d I just tell you about getting cocky?” I said, and she grinned, and then she kissed me on the tip of my nose. 

_Yeah_ , I thought. _This’ll all work out._


	9. Eddie, Seven Months

I’d been twenty-four years old when I married Myra, our wedding just one more tidy, uncomplicated checkmark in a life full of them. I’d earned an undergraduate degree from Cornell, _cum laude_ , in economics, and progressed from college to a three-year stint at McKinsey. That’s where we met, on the New Ventures floor of the Manhattan office, our cubicles in the same neighborhood. She asked me to dinner, and then to a movie. As the years passed, she continued to do most of the asking. By the time her contract was up and she asked me if we had a future together, I felt it behooved me to say yes.

At the time, “yes” seemed like the obvious answer. Maybe even a good one. Mommy had died during my second year at Cornell; Myra had filled the void she’d left behind. I had, once more, someone to worry about me, to pack my lunches, to ensure I took my medication at the same time every morning. Myra liked to be in charge -- at work, at home, in our social circle. She saw me, I think, as a safe bet. Someone who would support her ambitions and defer to her judgment. Someone good enough to reflect well on her, but not great enough to supersede her. We got married at City Hall. We went out for a nice lunch afterward. We went home to our new apartment, and then we had sex for the first time, where I learned that she liked to be in charge in the bedroom, too.

Four or five years in, we had a fight about kids: I wanted them, she didn’t. As a compromise, we moved to Westchester and adopted a hamster, which died instantaneously. We took this as a hint. No more pets, and, certainly, no children. She bought the furniture and booked the vacations, hired the cleaning ladies and dismissed the lazy ones, slid date nights into my iCal alongside dental appointments and dinner parties. This suited me fine. Being told what to do seemed, at the time, like a comfort.

When I look back now, though, on the sixteen years I spent married to Myra, living like this, I just feel this fucking ocean of grief well up in me. There was no love there. Never was. It was such a nothing of a marriage. I was lonely, and not just because I didn’t know my wife; I never got to know myself, either. Truthfully, I didn’t want to know myself. It had been obvious to me since I was a child that I was gay -- certainly, I was called _faggot_ on the playground enough that the message came through -- but I didn’t accept this fact, didn’t want to. When Myra came along, when she showed genuine interest in me, I was relieved. I could play this role, I thought, convincingly enough: the man with the wife and the briefcase and the townhouse upstate. The man who wanted for nothing. Who wanted nothing.

I didn’t know what it was to desire someone until that weekend in Derry, when we emerged, drenched in blood and ordure and, miraculously, alive, from the caverns below the Neibolt House. Actually, no; “desire” is the wrong word. It implies wanting, and my love for Richie was a matter of need. I could not, would not, continue my life without him. The morning after we first slept together, I woke with my head on his broad chest, and I lifted my eyes to see the sun tilting across his face. A gleaming line of drool cut through dark stubble. I lifted my hand to wipe it away, and he stirred, half-asleep, and kissed the pad of my thumb. I knew, then and there, that I would leave Myra and marry him at the earliest available opportunity. There were no other options.

We still hadn’t really talked about marriage, though. Even now, a mere two months out from Bev’s due date. My divorce had not been a tidy one. Myra fought me every step of the way. It seemed pointless to start planning a wedding when we didn’t even know how long it would be until the state of New York declared me legally single. Besides, it wasn’t as though we needed to be married in order to live together, or even to adopt a baby. I reassured myself that a marriage certificate was just a piece of paper, a bureaucratic formality, that it didn’t truly matter -- until I got the call from my lawyer one Monday morning en route to work.

“The judge has officially granted you and Myra a divorce,” she said. “Effective thirty-one days from now. It’s over. You’re free.”

I thanked her. I hung up. I drove another block closer to my office, and then I thought better of it, called in sick, and pulled a U-Turn. Twenty minutes later, I was standing over a glass countertop at Ethan Lord, poring over rings.

Thirty-five days had passed, and that ring had been burning a hole in my pocket all the while. I could have popped the question at any time, of course: on the couch, at the coffee shop, even in bed. But something just didn’t feel right about that. I’d done the low-key City Hall wedding before. It wasn’t for me. This time, I wanted spectacle. I wanted romance. The moment had to be perfect.

It didn’t take me long to decide when, exactly, I would do it: the night of the Netflix taping. Richie would stroll off the stage, still basking in applause and adoration. He’d find me in the wings. I’d sink to one knee. We’d remember it forever. We’d tell our grandkids about it.

So I asked Richie to let me tag along for his dress rehearsal the day before the big show. “I’m curious,” I told him. “I want to see how the sausage gets made.”

In reality, of course, I wanted to choreograph my proposal down to the letter. Where did I need to be? When did I need to be there? Could I rope any members of his crew into aiding and abetting my plot? I was running down my checklist as we drove over to the theatre that afternoon, windows down, a cool breeze blowing in. I was in a great mood, and so was he -- running bits by me, making me laugh, reaching over to a rest a hand on my thigh while he drove. “God, you’re so little,” he said, and squeezed my leg, knowing exactly what the fuck he was doing. “See? My hand looks huge on your thigh.” I would have begged him to just pull over and have his way with me had it not been for the Springsteen song that came on the radio just then. I turned it up for him, and we both sang along. He knew every word, and I only knew _something, something, something, hungry heart,_ but it didn’t matter. We were still singing, smiles on our faces, when we pulled up outside the theatre and parked.

“I’ll see you after the show,” he said, as he kissed me goodbye, and I felt a thrill roll up my spine. Oh, he’d see me after the show, all right. Tomorrow night. Down on one knee. With a ring in my hand.

He hurried off, then, to hair and makeup -- and, by the way, I still found it very, very funny that Richie, _my_ Richie, who didn’t know a moisturizer from an exfoliant, could command an entire hair and makeup department -- and I milled around backstage, grazing from the craft services table. I was trying to spot Richie’s manager, a tallish fellow with a red cloud of curls, when he happened to walk up behind me and tap me on the shoulder. I whirled around, surprised, and said hello. He introduced me to two people from Netflix. “This is Eddie Kaspbrak,” he said. “Richie’s boyfriend.”

I still hadn’t grown used to “boyfriend.” Truth be told, I didn’t really like the word. It embarrassed me more than anything. It felt so juvenile, so little-kid. Myra had brutalized me with it, too, during the few phone calls we’d exchanged in the early days of our divorce proceedings. “You’re out there in Chicago,” she’d sneer, “shacked up with your little _boyfriend_.” I shouldn’t have allowed her to put me off the word, but I couldn’t deny it: her tactic had worked. Most of the time, I went for “partner,” even though it felt both too formal and too vague. What else was there, anyway? What was I supposed to call him? “Lover?” No. I liked the sound of “fiancé” much better.

And I really, really liked the sound of “husband.”

That’s what I was thinking about when they ushered me into the cavernous theater for Richie’s sound-check, when I rose up with the rest of the crew to applaud him, when he met my eyes in the small crowd and smiled right at me, just for me. I was thinking, “He’s going to be my husband.”

“What’s up, Chicago!” he bellowed, like we were 300 people, or 3,000, instead of 30. “How we all feeling tonight? Yeah? We feeling good? I’m feeling _real_ good. You may have heard that I just started seeing somebody…” He paused, grinned, as his crew wolf-whistled at him, and his manager grabbed my shoulders and shook me lightly, gleefully. “Yeah, yeah. Thanks. For real this time. True love and shit. Only been seven months, but I swear to God, I have never been this fucking whipped in my life.”

Another break for clapping, whistling. I should have joined in, but I was too overwhelmed by the moment. It was all I could do to clasp my hands over my chest and work to keep the tears welling in my eyes from spilling over. God, but I loved him. I loved him! And I was going to propose to him! This weekend!

“You want to know how whipped I am?” Richie continued. “The other night, I got down on my knees on the bathroom floor and scrubbed the space between the tiles with a toothbrush. See, when your boyfriend’s a total neat freak, that’s how you earn your blowjobs. Let me tell you, folks, I never thought I’d have to _work_ for a blowjob. That’s how I know it’s true love.”

This wasn’t exactly true, of course. He was just exaggerating for the sake of the joke. I’d pushed Richie to pick up the slack on his chores, sure, but he was hardly Martha Stewart. I still had to remind him to put the toilet seat down and rinse the sauce off the pots before they went in the dishwasher. He wasn’t the type to get down on his knees and scrub with a toothbrush. I’d never asked him to do that. And certainly not in exchange for… for…”

“Another thing: turns out blowjobs are way better -- I mean, like, next-level, mind-blowingly good -- when they’re coming from a man.”

Raucous laughter, waves of applause. I stood still, my hands locked over my chest. I was startled by what he was saying -- but why? Surely I should’ve seen this coming. Richie had always been a sex comic. I suppose I just considered our sex, the sex we had, to be private. Sex was hard for me, after all. It had taken a long time and a lot of effort for me to have sex with Richie, to even allow him to see me naked. I’d fretted every step of the way. And now all these people were laughing about it. They were, of course, Richie’s crew, his friends, his people. They were in his corner. They weren’t the same hostile bullies who’d laughed at my rainbow shorts in the schoolyard and shoved me headlong into mud puddles. But they were still laughing at the mere fact of two men having sex. Two men who, in this particular joke, were very explicitly myself and Richie. That’s how my frantic, prey-animalian brain was breaking it down, as Richie spoke: _they’re laughing at you; they know that you like to get down on your knees and suck on another man’s penis; they think it’s disgusting; they think you’re a joke; they think…_

“You think I would have figured that out by now, seeing as I’ve known I was gay since I was twelve.” Richie was still talking. Unbelievably, he was still talking. Didn’t he know, couldn’t he see, that I was starting to panic? “But there was always this voice in the back of my head like, ‘Hey, whatever -- man or woman, a mouth is a mouth, right?’ Wrong. Wrong! It’s not the same. It’s just not the same. See, with a dude, you don’t have to worry about getting lip gloss on your dick. Do you know how fucking unbearable that is? Lip gloss on your dick? Like, imagine: you’re a gay man, you’ve just gotten a beej from a woman -- so you’re already batting zero -- and you’re lying there, smoking a cigarette, regretting everything, and then you look down and you see goddamned glitter on your limp dick.” He paused; the biggest laugh yet. “Don’t have to worry about that anymore, thank fuck. My boyfriend gives head like a champ. My boyfriend _swallows_.”

Well, that was it. I was out. I stumbled to my feet and mumbled my excuse-me’s, trying to make a quiet exit. But I was front row, center, and so everybody, the whole crew, saw me sprint to the side door of the auditorium. Richie, too. I heard, but didn’t see, his breath catch when he stumbled over his next sentence on the stage.

And then the door was clattering shut behind me, and I was all alone in an empty grey cinderblock corridor. I sank to the floor. If I crouched, if I put my head between my knees, if I took deep breaths, then maybe, just maybe, I might find a way back into my body. I screwed my eyes shut, unclamped my jaw, emptied my lungs. Something, anything to slow my racing breath.

I hated this. Hated feeling like this. Ever since Bev had come to us seven months ago, ever since we’d agreed to adopt her baby, something inside of me had been scraped raw. I bruised way too easily these days. Any dumb little thing could make me fearful, send me spiraling. But this? This, I was almost certain, was not a dumb little thing. It was a big thing. A very bad thing. It was all the pride I’d taken earlier, my smug joy at looking up at Richie and thinking _he’s going to be my husband_ turned dark and sick in a funhouse mirror.

Everybody knew, of course, that Richie and I were together. It only stood to reason that they knew Richie and I were having sex. But until Richie had walked onto that stage, until he’d told that joke, they hadn’t known about me on my knees in front of Richie, with his penis in my mouth, with his semen cooling on my tongue. I’d barely come to terms with it myself. I still felt so ashamed, so unclean in the moments afterward, that I had to race to the bathroom to brush my teeth, and floss, and flush with Listerine.

But now, everybody knew.

Everybody knew.

The door swung open. I looked back, over my shoulder. Richie, face full of concern.

“Eds?” he said. “Sweetheart?”

I opened my mouth to speak. A ragged, mortifying sob rolled out instead. In an instant, he was next to me, kneeling on the floor, wrapping me up in his arms, pulling me to his chest, murmuring, “Hey, hey, it’s okay. You’re okay. I’ve got you.”

I nodded. It was all I could do.

“What happened?” he asked, quietly. “Like, what brought it on this time?”

I just looked at him, incredulous. How could he even ask me that? Wasn’t it obvious? He read the lines of my face and reared back, drew his brows together, confused.

“One of my jokes?” he said. “ _I_ did this?”

I turned my eyes to the floor, away from him. “Yeah,” I mumbled.

“What did I say?” he asked. “Eddie, which one? Which joke? Tell me.”

“You… you talked about… about me giving you… doing… us having…” I couldn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t say _oral sex_ out loud. Not right now. I breathed in, tried to squeeze a full sentence out: “I didn’t know you were going to do that.”

“I’m so sorry,” Richie said, softly, genuinely. “I would have -- I should have -- run it all past you. But you kept saying you wanted to be surprised.”

“I didn’t think you’d do this,” I said, pathetic, through tears. “You can’t… can’t get up there and… and talk about us having sex.”

“Well, I…” Richie breathed out, halted, searching for words. “I mean, I do make jokes about sex, but --”

“Sex you’re having with me,” I interrupted.

“But it’s not like…” He paused, thought for a second, and began again: “I mean, I’ve always done sex comedy, right? That’s just what I do. I tell sex jokes. And for a long time, I told jokes about straight sex. Like, sex I’d never had. Sex I’d pretended to have. Sex that I _did_ have, but never wanted to have. And that’s how I kept myself in the closet, Eddie. I’d go up onstage and play this character. And it really fucked me up.

“Okay,” I said. _What’s your point?_ I didn’t.

“I mean, I was basically using stand-up to hurt myself,” he said. “And if I want to keep working -- I mean, if I want to take this back, this thing I love doing -- then I need to be honest, you know? I need to talk about who I actually am. What I really do. Even if it’s scary. Especially if it is.”

“I don’t see why,” I said, better able, to form full sentences, “you have to tell everyone how we have sex.”

“Well, Eddie, I…” He paused, stammering, clearly at a loss for words. “It’d just be weird if I did this big coming out special and I didn’t talk about sex. Especially now, like… I’ve told so many jokes about sex that was bad for me, and now I get to talk about good sex, sex that’s good for me, like…”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Richie,” I cut in, while he searched for his next excuse. “I’m not trying to keep you down, but you can’t tell the whole world that I _swallow_.”

I had him there. His mouth hung open. “I… I mean… I hear you, Eddie, but…”

“But what?” I said, more desperate than angry. I pulled myself away, out of his arms, and rose up. “Change it. Cut it all out. All the jokes about the sex we have, about scrubbing the floor so I’ll give you suck your penis…”

“Eddie, I can’t just ‘cut it all out,’” he said, pained, still seated on the floor, staring up at me. “Like, you’re talking about half the act.”

“Half the act?” I repeated. “ _Half the act?_ ”

“I’m so sorry,” he said, again. “I should have run this by you sooner.”

The corridor, bare and grey, had the cold feel of an underground military base. A tunnel. I hadn’t, historically, done well in tunnels. Even as I could sense myself winning the argument, I knew I was losing something far more essential.

“Well, let’s figure this out,” I said, stepping back, playing the collaborator, the peacemaker. “Do you have any other material banked?”

“I’ve been working on _this_ material for months,” he said.

“Can you write something new?”

“We’re filming tomorrow night.”

“You can’t reschedule?”

He pulled in a deep breath. “I repeat: we’re filming tomorrow night.”

“So everyone’s going to know,” I said, newly pissed, and paced away from him. “Everyone is going to know that I… that we have sex, and...”

Richie did something, then, that I’d never seen him do: he exploded. He was up on his feet in an instant, not yelling, screaming: “Of fucking course people are gonna know! Unless we hole up in a fucking basement and we never go outside! We’re forty fucking years old, Eddie! We’re allowed to have sex! It’s not a fucking scandal!”

“Excuse me?” I couldn’t match his volume, but I could sure as hell match his fury, his indignation, his fucking audacity. “‘It’s not a scandal?’ I’m sorry, who was so terrified of coming out that I had to press the button for him? How many times have you told me you’re afraid people will call you a faggot or --”

“People _do_ call me a faggot!”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “And that doesn’t scare you?”

“Of course it fucking scares me!” His arms flew up in the arm. “That’s the whole reason I’m doing this! So people like us won’t have to live in fucking fear anymore!”

“Oh,” I said, stepping away, shaking my head. “Okay, so now you’re a fucking activist.” I dropped my arms, put my hands together, clapped loud into the echo of the corridor. “Bravo, Richie. Round of applause for Harvey fucking Milk over here.”

“Oh my God, I’m not saying I’m a fucking activist! But if I get up on that stage and I tell some dumb joke about being gay and it makes some kid watching at home on his laptop feel less alone, then --”

“ _I_ feel alone!” I cried.

Richie fell silent. He walked to the wall, leaned forward against it, forehead first. And then, on the swell of a breath out, he said, “Fuck.”

I waited for him. After all that, I still thought he might turn around, say he was sorry, commit to re-writing the whole routine, take me in his arms and erase the last ten minutes. He didn’t. He stood with his face to the wall and he stayed there, silent, until I reached into my pocket for my car keys. I felt the outline of the blue velvet box in my pocket. The ring I’d planned to give him.

I ached.

“I’m going home,” I said.

“Okay,” said Richie. He didn’t turn, didn’t look at me. I moved away from him, began to walk up the corridor, and I heard him repeat, under his breath, “Fuck.”

It was spitting rain when I stepped out into the parking lot. I hadn’t brought a jacket or an umbrella -- it had been sunny on the way over, the two of us singing Springsteen, Richie’s hand huge on my slim thigh -- and so I had no choice but to let the rain fall on me as I made my way to the car. It was too fucking much, too goddamn literal.

I opened the door and I sat down in the driver’s seat and I slammed my fist into the steering wheel over and over and over again, until my knuckles ached, and then I opened my hand and brought my palm down on the car horn and let it wail, uninterrupted, for I don’t know how long. I’d been so stupid. So fucking stupid. I’d been planning a fucking proposal. I’d driven over here sketching out exactly when and where I was going to sink to one knee and ask him to marry me. And now I was going to go home and pack up my things and slink out of our apartment, because he’d fucked everything up, because I’d fucked everything up, because he just had to have his stupid jokes, because I was such a fucking Puritan about sex. The blame volleyed back and forth in my head; I couldn’t decide whether I hated him or hated myself.

Seven months. We’d only made it seven fucking months. And I had nothing to show for it. Nothing but a bundle of divorce papers and a ring that I’d have to return. I thought I’d figured it all out, that my marriage to Myra had collapsed because I was gay. But I had two failures under my belt now, and there was only one common denominator: me.

 _The baby_ , I thought, abruptly, and brought my fist down on the horn once again. Fuck. What would we do? Would there even be a baby? Would Richie raise it alone? Would Bev? Would I? Would Bev even consent to being my friend after this, or would she take Richie’s side? Would they all take Richie’s side? Would I be even more alone in the future than I was now?

The sun had set. The fury had gone out of my body. I uncurled my fists, put the key in the ignition, and pulled out. I was going to go home, I decided. I was going to go back to the apartment that, at least for now, was mine. I was going to lie down in the bed that still belonged to me, and I was going to sleep. And when I woke up, God willing, I’d be less crazy, and Richie would be there, and we would figure out what we wanted to do. And if he wanted me to leave, I thought, as I sailed out of the parking lot, merged with traffic -- well, I understood why.


	10. Richie, Seven Months

Since I was due to have a kid in a couple months, I’d been thinking a lot about when I used to be one. The more I remembered about all the shit I used to get up to, the worse I felt for my mom and dad. I’d basically been a piece of work from the second I popped out of the womb and started wailing like a firetruck. A picky eater, a bedwetter, an all-but-blind bit of bully-bait: that was me, baby. At some point, I know, early on, my parents had plans to give me a sibling. You won’t be surprised when I tell you those plans didn’t survive the brief but harrowing phase when I was two or three and I started compulsively plucking my own poop out of the training potty and painting murals on the furniture with it. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get human shit out of rayon upholstery? Because Maggie and Wentworth Tozier sure do. God, I feel like I owe them money. Or at least, like, a Wayfair gift card. Reparations.

The brattiest I’d ever been, though, had to be the day my cousin Frieda got married. Hands down. Over the years, it had spun out into a family legend, how badly I’d behaved at this wedding. My parents were the kind of enlightened yuppies who didn’t believe in corporal punishment, so they doled out the closest thing they could to an ass-beating: no television, no Atari, and no dessert for a full month. My mom made me write a letter -- well, more like print a note, in loopy crayon on construction paper, but still -- apologizing to Frieda and her new husband for fucking up their special day. That might seem harsh, seeing as I was only five years old at the time. But that’s old enough to know better than to blow your nose on the bride’s heirloom train.

Let me backtrack a little, though. Let me take you back to that booster seat in the Dodge Caravan, en route to the Third Parish Mid-Coast Presbyterian Church, on that hot and humid August weekend. I was strapped in tight, sweating through a polyester suit the color of an Easter egg, and all I wanted, literally, the only thing in the world, was to free myself from the noose of my bow-tie. Mom, in front, lifting her eyes to the rearview mirror to check her lipstick, happened to catch me working both thumbs behind the satin tourniquet and straining with all my might -- which wasn’t much -- to tear the stupid thing off my neck.

“Richie!” She twisted her lipstick, capped it. “You leave that alone!”

“I don’t wanna!” I fired back. “It _hu-uu-uurts!_ ”

“Hey, now, this is a big day, champ,” Dad chimed in. He sure called me “champ” an awful lot considering I was damn near legally blind, lagging in all motor functions, and notoriously useless at dodgeball, Red Rover, tag, Capture the Flag, hopscotch, and just about any other physical activity a kindergartener could be compelled to take part in. “You want to look your best for Frieda’s wedding, don’t you?”

“No!” I barked. It’d be a while yet, by the way, before I’d learn to start my sentences with anything but _no_ or _I don’t wanna._ So, like, brace yourself. “I don’t wanna go to the stupid wedding!”

“But you get to be Frieda’s ringbearer,” Mom said, “and you get to wear that fancy suit!”

“I don’t wanna wear the suit!” I replied, and you gotta understand: this suit was just a total abomination. Sweaty synthetic fabric in off-grey lavender, layered over a ruffled white button-down and a gleaming, too-tight cummerbund. It had tails. I was, obviously, too young and unsophisticated to really articulate the visceral horror I felt wearing this thing, so I just said: “It’s all gross and itchy and purple.”

“Purple?” Mom’s brows went up. “What’s wrong with purple?”

“Well, Maggie, you gotta admit…” Dad cast a dubious look over his shoulder, into the backseat. He, at least, was with me on this one. The suit belonged in the trash. “Purple’s not exactly his color.”

“Well, Frieda wanted everyone in the wedding party to wear purple,” Mom said, acting all, _yeah, it’s hideous, but what am I supposed to do about it?_ “So he’s wearing purple, and that’s that.”

“ _You’re_ not wearing purple,” I observed. “Your dress is green.”

“That’s because I’m not a fancy ringbearer, sweetie.”

“But I don’t wanna be a ringbearer!” I pouted. Sticking to my talking points, you know. “And I don’t wanna wear purple!”

Mom, out of patience, took a deep breath. “Frieda wants you to wear purple, Richie, so you have to wear purple. But when you get married, you can wear any color you want.”

Oh, now, this? Masterful diversion right here. Military-grade parenting. She’s steered me right out of a meltdown by handing me a question, something new to think about: when I got married, however many years down the line, what would I wear? Well, I’d just spent a week at this YMCA day camp twisting up balloon animals and cramming seeds into pinecone bird-feeders and tie-dying hand-me-down t-shirts, and I still hadn’t gotten over the rush of drowning my drab old clothes in technicolor, so I announced, “When I get married, I’m gonna wear tie-dye.”

“Sounds great, champ,” said Dad, relieved, now that Mom had talked me efficiently off the ledge of a tantrum. “I’ve never seen a tie-dye wedding before.”

“Yeah, it’s gonna be really cool,” I said. “We’re gonna do it at Chuck E. Cheese.”

“Do what?” he asked.

“My wedding,” I said, and clarified: “In the ball pit.”

Dad laughed. “Very romantic.”

“And for the cake,” I continued, “I’m gonna make Eddie’s mom do Funfetti with chocolate icing.”

“ _Eddie’s_ mom?” Mom feigned hurt. “You don’t want me to make the wedding cake? Another strawberry ice cream cake, like the one I made for your birthday?”

I thought, hard, for a second, then gave her a diplomatic nod. “I can have two cakes.”

“Very smart,” said Dad. “And what about your honeymoon?”

“What’s that?” I asked, one finger fishing in my left nostril.

“Don’t pick your nose,” said Mom. “It’s a vacation you go on right after you get married.”

I slid my finger out of my nose. “A vacation?”

“That’s right,” said Dad. “Anywhere you want, champ. Where are you gonna go?”

Oh, easy. I threw both hands in the air. A booger flew off the tip of my finger and hit the roof of the car, but -- phew -- nobody noticed. “ _Disneylaaaaaaaaaand!_ ”

“Oh, how perfect,” Mom cooed. Just like that, the trials of five minutes ago had been forgotten, forgiven; I was being cute again. “You can go on double dates with Minnie and Mickey!”

“Um, no.” I had other plans. “First, me and Eddie are gonna ride Space Mountain. And then we’re gonna go on the Jungle Cruise, and then…”

“Wait.” Dad laughed. “Now Eddie’s coming on your honeymoon, too?”

“Yep,” I said, and kept going, tripping over my words, I was so excited: “And… and we’re gonna go in the Haunted Mansion, and Pirates of the _C_ … of the _Crib_ … the one with the pirates, and we… we’re gonna eat turkey eggs -- I mean, legs, turkey legs -- and get Dole Whips, and then, if Eddie wants, we can…”

“Your friends don’t get to come with you on your honeymoon, sweetie,” said Mom. “Only the bride and groom.”

I pushed my drooping glasses up the bridge of my nose. “Who are they?”

“The bride is the girl,” said Mom, “and the groom is the boy.”

“But,” I said, slowly, squinting at her through my thick lenses, “I wanna marry Eddie.”

It’s been years, decades, since that day in the Dodge Caravan, but I’ve never been able to forget the way they laughed. Dad was shocked, then fucking delighted, like I’d just fired off a knee-slapper for the ages. He threw his head back and just about screamed. Probably, he was already dreaming up the stories he’d tell about this at cocktail parties. _Kids say the darndest things!_ Mom, though, she was quieter. When she turned, looking over her shoulder to meet my eyes, her whole face was a mask of revulsion, like I was some stray dog who’d just dropped a rodent carcass at her feet.

“Honey,” she said, in a voice like a plea, “boys don’t marry boys.”

“What?” I was outraged. “Why not?”

She thought for a second, chewed on her lip, and finally landed on: “Because it’s against the law.”

“That’s stupid!” I squawked. “I wanna marry Eddie!”

And hey, look: I was a dumb kid. A total brat. But it still strikes me that even then, back when my vocabulary basically boiled down to _no_ and _I don’t wanna_ , I was very clear on this one _yes_. This one _I wanna_.

I saw Dad grimace in the rearview mirror. “Better not go shouting that from the rooftops, champ. People might get the wrong idea.” Mom scowled, socked him in the shoulder. “Ow!” He turned his head to her. “What? What’d I say?”

“He’s only five, for Pete’s sake,” she hissed. “He doesn’t know any better. Don’t make this into something it’s not.”

I had no idea what they were talking about, so I repeated: “I wanna marry Eddie. He’s my best friend.”

“Well, when you grow up, you’ll meet a beautiful girl,” said Mom, stressing _girl_ just as much as _beautiful_ , “and then she’ll be your best friend, and you’ll marry her.”

She was trying to calm me down. Really, she was. But somewhere, deep down in my infant brain, this is when the fist came down on the panic button.

“I don’t wanna marry some stupid girl!” I bellowed, as loud as my little lungs would let me. And then, for the fourth and final time: “ _I wanna marry Eddie!_ ”

That’s when the tears came and the temper tantrum of legend really kicked off. It was too much. It was all way too fucking much. The nastily moist August heat. The slow strangulation of the stupid bow-tie. The horrifying prospect of losing my future happiness: my ball-pit nuptials presided over by Charles Entertainment Cheese, my Funfetti wedding cake, my Disneyland honeymoon with the boy I loved more than anything in the world, more than chocolate-chip cookies, more than Crayola Scentsation markers fresh out of the box, more than Santa. I commenced caterwauling and I was still caterwauling when we pulled up outside the church and Dad fished me, sweaty and screaming, out of my booster seat. Mom got down on her knees on the grass and grabbed me by the shoulders and hissed at me: If I didn’t shape up, she’d take away my Saturday morning cartoon privileges for a whole entire month. She’d take away the Atari. She’d take away ice cream, swimming lessons, trips to the arcade.

But I was not having it. No, ma’am. Not one little bit. I tripped over my shiny new shoes in the aisle and dropped both rings and the satin pillow to boot. I tugged on the priest’s sleeve and asked him, loudly, “When’s this gonna be over?” Only after I blew my nose, noisily and productively, onto Frieda’s long white lace train, did my parents finally remove me to a subterranean Sunday School classroom to sit and think about what I’d done. There, a teenaged bridesmaid-turned-babysitter watched, bored and gum-chewing, as I wreaked havoc on a plastic Noah’s Arc. I bundled up a lion and an elephant and I made the lion kiss the tip of the elephant’s trunk and then I marched them onto the boat together. I repeated this process with a crocodile and a giraffe, a cow and an ostrich, a zebra and a tiger.

“But won’t the tiger eat the zebra?” asked my caretaker.

A bit of spittle flew out of her mouth on the _z_ in _zebra_ and landed on my cheek. I wiped it away. I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “‘The tiger and the zebra are in love.”

“They’re in love?”

“Yeah,” I said. “They both have stripes.”

I remember that day, the day of Frieda’s bungled wedding, because it was the first time I ever said out loud that I wanted to marry a boy. And it might have been the last time, if not for that weekend in Derry. How fucking dumb is that? I was really ready to just die in the closet. All through my twenties, my thirties, I’d never once considered coming out. It just wasn’t going to happen. It was a pipe dream, an idiot kid’s fantasy, as impossible as Funfetti wedding cake and a ceremony in a ball-pit and a honeymoon on Space Mountain.

Which, maybe, was why it felt so fantastical now, almost four full decades later, that me and Eddie had actually made it. We were living together, having sex three to four times a week, getting ready to adopt a whole-ass human infant. Like, mission accomplished! We’d fucking pulled it off! There was just one thing we hadn’t done, and I’d been thinking about that one thing a lot lately. Specifically, I’d been thinking about it since last week, when I was plugging my phone into its charger, and I happened to see an e-mail pop up on the screen of Eddie’s phone -- from his divorce lawyer, subject line of, ‘Congratulations! Final invoice for div…’” I looked at that e-mail and I saw official confirmation that Eddie was now legally single in the state of New York. And all I could think was the same thing I couldn’t stop screaming that long-ago day in the back of the Dodge Caravan: _I wanna marry Eddie_.

Me and Eddie had never actually talked about the whole “getting married” thing. I don’t know why we didn’t talk about it. We talked about everything else. We were committed, obviously, for the long haul. We were having a kid. But the actual ceremony, the piece of paper, the legal binding? Not a conversation. Not yet, at least. Not least of all since Myra had been hell-bent on dragging out the divorce for as long as possible. Tell you the truth, after everything Eddie went through with Myra, I wasn’t sure he even wanted to get married again. Maybe he’d feel trapped. Maybe he’d think it was a waste of time, just making official something we already knew. Maybe he’d spent a little too much time with Kay and he thought marriage was a sinister tool of the patriarchy or whatever.

But, like, I figured I could at least ask.

So I went to Sears one day while Eddie was out at work. Good thing he wasn’t a girl so I wouldn’t have to shell out a zillion dollars for some stupid diamond. No, a simple silver wedding band would do just fine, I figured. I picked up a really nice one for just $66.24 plus tax, with a tiny velvet box and everything. And then, on my way out into the parking lot, little plastic Sears bag swinging at my side, an idea jumped into my head. I knew, suddenly, exactly how I’d ask him to marry me. And where. And when.

The night of the Netflix special.

No, no, not just the night of. _During_. I’d call him up onstage for a final bow, and then I’d drop down on one knee. Boom. On camera. Forever. The perfect grand finale to an hour-long set all about how we met and how much I loved his ass. (I mean “loved his ass” as in “loved him.” Not that I don’t appreciate the fine qualities of his ass. The curve. The bounce. The delicate puckering of his little rosebud asshole. Wow! Okay, Tozier! Dial it back!) Anyway, it was the best idea I’d ever had, this grand, public proposal. It’d go down in history. One for the ages.

...But then I’d gone and fucked everything up! All of it! Really, how hard would it have been to run the Netflix jokes by Eddie just once? One single time? We’d been through shit like this before, obviously -- Eddie freaking out, me calming him down -- but I’d never actually been the cause, the source, of his panic. Which made me think that maybe this was, like, it. Maybe we were done. Maybe I’d get back to the apartment and find all his shit gone. Empty space on the mantel where his Willow Tree Angels used to be. No more love notes in the mornings. That’s probably what I deserved, I guess. I’d been a real asshole.

And maybe that sounds, like, insane, or overly pessimistic, but whatever, fuck you, I was having a rough fucking day. Part of me wanted to stay in that cinderblock hallway with him forever, just holding him and hearing him and trying my best to make things right. But the grown-up part of me, not the grasping little kid, knew I had to let him walk away. He needed to cool down. We both did. Plus, I had a $2.5 million contract to fulfill, which, as my manager wasted zero time telling me, was in serious jeopardy on account of how bad I’d whiffed the dress rehearsal. We spent three fucking hours going over his notes in the green room, way after the crew went home. He gave me a lot of, “Get it together, you piece of shit.” I gave him a lot of, “I will, I swear, I don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with me today.” He was like, “Whatever’s going on with you and your boyfriend? Whatever fight you’re having?” And I was like, “Yeah?” And he was like, “Fix it. Wrap it up. Bring your A game tomorrow, or you’re done.”

I said, “Got it. I said, “Will do.”

And then I walked outside and hailed a cab and the cabbie said, “Where to?” and I said, “Boystown,” which, by the way, was the wrong answer. Well, it was wrong for someone who was supposed to go home, make nice with his boyfriend, and get a rejuvenating good night’s sleep before the biggest show of his life. But for anyone looking to sulk over a tequila sunrise (or eight), it was definitely the right answer.

So fifteen minutes later I found a rainbow-smeared bar full of boys twenty years my junior grinding on each other while a pop song about eating pussy blared loud enough to shatter my eardrums. I ordered my first sunrise, and I watched the dance-floor. I was going to go home -- I was! -- and I was going to apologize to Eddie, but first, I wanted to spend some time in a place where people were still young and dumb enough to actually believe in this love shit. I don’t know how they did it, these boys, dancing and kissing and touching each other. Like they’d never been hurt. Like we weren’t living in hell. Like Trump wasn’t president. They left their worries at the fucking door, these kids. They looked carefree, happy, soaked in light. If I could stay here for a second, just watch, drink it all in, maybe I’d feel what they were feeling. Maybe I could go home and face Eddie. Maybe I could make everything right again. Could I? Were we going to survive this stupid fight?

It wasn’t like we’d never argued before, obviously. We argued plenty. It was even fun, sometimes. And, oh my God, sexually charged, too, the way we’d needle and tease each other. But this fight felt different, a bigger deal, not the kind of thing we could laugh off or fuck away. I mean -- I realized, with a sick pang in the pit of my gut -- Eddie had up and walked away from me. I didn’t know what to do with that. Was he just trying to cool down? Did he hate me? What if he was packing up his shit right this second? Ha! The night before I was due to propose! Oh, Christ, I needed more tequila. But I got the feeling there wasn’t enough liquor in the world.

I ordered a second drink. The bartender slid it over to me. I took the first sip -- well, first glug -- and then my phone buzzed. _Incoming call from Eddie Kaspbrak_ , said the screen. Did I, one and a half sheets to the wind, wish to accept? And let him interrogate me about where I was? And why I wasn’t home yet? And just get right into the dogshit fight we were bound to have, right now, over the phone, while tipsy? Hell no. I declined the call and shoved my phone back into my jeans. Seconds later, my pocket buzzed again: _Eddie Kaspbrak, incoming_. I declined. Before I could even jam it back into my pocket, it started buzzing again. So I silenced it. I shoved it back where it belonged. I ordered more tequila.

Then I felt it: the hand on my shoulder, the breath in my ear. “Why the long face?” I turned to look and I saw that the voice belonged to a bleached-blond kid who couldn’t have been more than, like, 25. “Come on,” he cooed, tugging on my elbow. “Come dance with me.”

I snorted. “I’m old enough to be your dad.”

He blinked. “I know,” he said. “That’s what I’m into.”

I was way too far gone to have, like, any control whatsoever over my body or my face, so I think I literally stuck out my tongue and pretended to gag. He did not like that, this kid, not one bit. He crossed his arms and he got all huffy and he was like, “So, what, you’re just gonna sit at the bar all night? Not talk to anyone?” And I was like, “Yeah, dude,” and I tried to turn back to my drink but he was still hovering -- like a fucking mosquito or something, I swear -- and he went, “I don’t care if you’re a lonely old closet case or whatever, but you don’t have to be fucking rude about it.”

I turned. I looked at him. I closed my eyes for a moment and I saw Bart Simpson before a chalkboard writing I WILL NOT FISTFIGHT THIS TWINK AND GET SENT TO JAIL FOR AGGRAVATED ASSAULT. I WILL NOT FISTFIGHT THIS TWINK AND GET SENT TO JAIL FOR AGGRAVATED ASSAULT. I WILL NOT FISTFIGHT THIS TWINK AND GET SENT TO JAIL FOR AGGRAVATED ASSAULT. I was grateful for him, my internal Bart Simpson, my voice of reason. I took a breath. I opened my eyes. I cleared my throat.

“For your information, I…” I paused. I was going to say, “I have a boyfriend,” but that sounded so unserious, so juvenile, so instead, I lied, and I said, “I’m married.”

“Yeah, I figured.” The kid rolled his eyes. “Wife at home? You told her you were going to go watch the Bears with the boys?”

“What? No, I…” I shook my head. “A man. I’m married to a man.”

“I don’t see a man,” he said, and his eyes darted down, to my hand. “Or a wedding ring.”

I opened my mouth to tell him to go fuck himself, but something else came out, one of those hideous, pre-barf burps that you can, like, taste. And I figured I had two options: a) get to a bathroom, stat, or b) projectile vomit all over this kid. I was honestly tempted to go for b), I’ll tell you that much, but no, I’m not a monster. I stood up on shaky legs and I stumbled away from him, to the back of the bar, to the bathroom.

I didn’t quite make it to the toilet.

Well, shit. I grabbed a handful of toilet paper and I bent over to mop up my mess, and of course, of fucking course, my phone decided to swan-dive out of my pocket, bounce off the rim of the porcelain bowl, and crash-land in the puddle of puke on the floor with a decadent, wet _smack_.

“Shit,” I muttered to myself. “Shit, shit, shit.”

I pulled my phone out of the puddle and I grabbed a fresh clump of toilet paper. I started scrubbing. It didn’t come off easy. A lot of shit was clinging to the phone: a kernel of corn from this morning’s veggie medley, some orange zest, the unmistakable reek of tequila. So when I hit the home button, part of the screen was blocked out by gunk, but not enough that I couldn’t see 41 missed calls, 143 new texts, and an e-mail from Eddie that just said, “CALL ME IMMEDIATELY - EMERG” and then a little nub of, like, carrot, I think, was blocking out the rest, but I think it probably had to be “ENCY.”

So. Okay. Two possibilities: Eddie had lost his fucking mind, or something very, very bad had happened. Like, someone had died. Or Pennywise was back. I was not in any way equipped to deal with any of this shit. I was crouching on the floor of a gender-neutral bathroom in Boystown, ankle-deep in my own vomit, not sober. But I would not, could not, ignore an “EMERG” message from Eddie, no matter where I was, or how drunk. So I unlocked my phone. I found Eddie’s name in my contacts, and I pressed it. I lifted my phone to my ear.

“Richie, oh my God, oh, thank fucking God.” Eddie picked up immediately. I didn’t hear him take a breath. “Jesus fucking Christ, I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for fucking hours. What the fuck? Where the fuck are you?”

“I’m sorry.” It came out in a long, broken sob, formed around a gasp. I felt tears, suddenly, sprouting on my cheeks. Rock fuckin’ bottom, meet Richie Tozier. “I fucked up, Eddie. I know I fucked up. And I… I…”

“No. We’re not doing that. Not right now.”

I blinked, sniffled. “Huh?”

“Bev’s water broke. We’re at Northwestern Memorial. How soon can you get here?”


	11. Beverly, One Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I placed a blanket trigger warning at the beginning of this fic for discussion of Bev's CSA. I'm repeating it now because it's an especially prominent theme in this chapter. Take care of yourselves!

I was eleven years old that day, seated in an art class. I was painting -- not well -- a still life, a bowl of fruit. That’s why I thought, at first, that the red pooling in the crotch of my shorts was the paint I’d used for the apple. Like maybe I’d been clumsy, spilled some. The girls around me were quick to set me straight. Cruel as ever, too. Not a single one offered so much as a spare maxi-pad. I was forced to walk, dripping, to the front of the classroom, where I asked Mr. Nelson for a hall pass. It was a small mercy that he allowed me to hide out in the bathroom for the rest of the -- ha! -- period. There, I perched on a toilet and contemplated the soiled underwear puddling around my ankles. That bright red spot on yellowed cotton, like a poor man’s flag of Japan. 

The only person to offer me any kindness that day was Ben. I didn’t know him yet, not really. To me, he was just the new kid, waiting at my locker when I emerged from the girls’ room. He held in his hands one of the bulky woollen sweaters he always wore to hide his chunky frame. Maybe, he suggested, I’d like to borrow it; I could wrap it around my waist, see, like this, to hide the worst of the stains. I thanked him. I took his gift. I paid for it later when a rumor got out that I’d sucked him off behind the school in exchange for the sweater. This was a piece of gossip as cruel to me as it was to him, so we wouldn’t speak for a while, me and Ben, after that day. I’d continue to spend my days at school alone, friendless, and distrustful of anyone who offered me help. 

That would end up being a problem, because I needed help. Lots of it. When I went home that night, I wasn’t quite able to evade my father before he noticed the borrowed sweater, my stained shorts. I remember his reaction with a repulsive clarity: his breath on my thigh, his thick fingers tugging down the zipper of my shorts, the lusty note in his voice when he said, “My little girl’s a woman now.” I begged him: please, don’t, not tonight. I told him how much my stomach hurt. But he had an answer for that. This was just the thing for the cramps, he said. He could make me feel good. Real good. 

After, I hid for a long while in the bathroom, soaking in the tub until the water cooled, until goose-pimples stood up all along my limbs and my nipples formed sharp points. I brought my knees to my chest, and then I wrapped myself up in my own arms. When I tilted my head, my kneecaps curved into the twin hollows of my eyes. I breathed in deep, but I still couldn’t smell it on me, the thing all the other girls could, the thing my father could, the thing that made me prey. No one had ever looked at me and seen a friend. No one saw something precious, worth protecting. I cried tears warmer than the bathwater and I wished, not for the first time, that somebody loved me. It seemed such a small thing to ask for, but so impossible, so far out of reach. I didn’t trust my father, and so I didn’t trust men, or any of the boys I knew. I’d be perfectly content, I thought, to never let a man touch me again. But I didn’t trust girls, either. Not after the way they’d cannibalized me at school. 

And so I was alone, utterly. But at least I could make a baby now. 

I don’t know how I managed to climb out of the tub and dry myself, but I did, and then I went to sleep, in my small, pink bedroom where the door didn’t lock. When I woke in the morning, the room was different, white-walled instead, and the pain in my abdomen was gone. In fact, nothing hurt at all. I was vaguely conscious of having just lived through some bodily catastrophe -- hit by a car, maybe, or thrown from my bicycle -- but there seemed to be a distance between myself and my body, between what I could touch and what I could feel. I was aware, too, that I was very tired, so tired that I couldn’t really move. How could this be, when I’d only just emerged from a full night of sleep? Even blinking, breathing, took more from me than I could really bear. When the rim of the plastic straw poked at my lip, it barely registered.

“Here,” a voice said. “Take a sip.”

Whose voice? Someone friendly, familiar. With great effort, I managed to open my mouth, close my lips around the straw, and suck. Water: clear, cool. When a little dribbled onto my chin, a hand was there, holding a soft cloth, wiping up. 

“Hi, honey.” I felt, distantly, a hand holding mine, on top of the white covers. “How are you feeling?” 

Who was speaking? A woman, but who? Someone from school, a teacher? I moved my eyes to look at her, and I took her in, her dark halo of hair, the rings beneath her brown eyes. Oh, I knew her. Yes, I did. I knew her, and I knew that I loved her, so I brought my fingers around hers, and I squeezed. Something glimmered in her eye, then. Water, I realized. 

“Why are you crying?” I asked her. Speech was difficult, slow. “What happened?” 

“You were so fucking brave.” She shook her head, laughed, brought the heel of her hand to her eye to clear away a tear or two. “You kicked ass.”

I laughed, weakly. “Feel more like I got my ass kicked.” 

“Yeah, well, you should see the other guy.” She laughed, mirthlessly. “Girl, I mean. It’s a girl.”

I squinted. “Who’s a girl?” 

“Your baby,” she said, and then stopped, corrected herself: “Well, Richie and Eddie’s baby. They’re with her now. In the NICU.” 

“Oh.” I couldn’t quite put faces to these names, so I ventured a safe: “How are they?” 

“Oh, Beverly.” Her eyes, crumpling, began once more to shine with tears. “They’re in love with her.” She laughed. “ _I’m_ in love with her. She’s tiny, so tiny. Fits in the palm of your hand, practically. But she’s tough, you know? She’s strong. A fighter. Just like you.” 

I didn’t understand what she was saying, couldn’t see how anyone could ever remark on my strength. If I was strong, it was only because I’d endured a whole lot of horseshit, not because I’d done anything special. I looked at her, studied her, and wondered what she saw in me. 

“I don’t feel all that strong,” I said. “I feel all… fuzzy.” 

“I don’t blame you,” she said. “Right now, you’re running on enough painkillers to knock out an elephant.” 

“That sounds bad,” I said, and then, probably with less fervor than the occasion called for: “I’m not going to die, am I?”

She shook her head. “No, no. I think they’re going to keep you here a couple days so you can heal, but no, you’re going to be fine, Beverly.” 

“And you’ll stay with me?” 

“Oh, you know it,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.” 

I noticed, then, that she looked like she’d been up all night: her hair falling frizzy around her face, her eyes bloodshot, her make-up non-existent. I couldn’t tell, not for certain, but she looked to be wearing pajamas. So I asked her, “Are you wearing pajamas?” 

“Sure am.” She snorted. “Didn’t have time to change before we rode over here in the ambulance. Haven’t been home to change yet. Didn’t sleep, either.” 

Why? Why had she done this? Why had she taken such good care of me, and why had she waited with me for so long? I squinted at her, tried to understand, and finally, just asked: “Do you love me?” 

She drew closer, her face concerned. I felt her grip my hand grow tighter, more serious. 

“Beverly,” she said, disbelieving, “of course I love you.” 

“Oh, good,” I said. I yawned, felt my eyelids drooping, my lights going out. “I love you, too.” 

I turned my head on the pillow then, and I closed my eyes. Just like that, I was somewhere else -- not the white-walled room, not the pink room of my childhood with its open door, but somewhere dark, and still, and safe, where my hand would always be held. 


	12. Eddie, One Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everybody go say thank you to [ashleyrguillory](https://ashleyrguillory.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr for the stunning art this chapter!

For the better part of my childhood, my mother maintained that I was weak, singularly prone to illness. She trained me to fear the vague threats of calamity that lurked around every corner, a habit I carried with me well into my adulthood. Now, I’ll allow that I was small as a child. Short, certainly, and skinny, the runt of the local litter. I attracted bullies and bruised easily. But I was never so fragile as the tiny newborn before me now, struggling for life in her glowing glass cocoon.

And so, when I looked at her for the first time, my daughter, two thoughts leapt into my mind: first, that I loved her, and second, that I hated my mother.

Our daughter was born early, much too early, at only 28 weeks. She was yellow with jaundice, a poor complement to the featherlight dusting of red lanugo on her tiny head. It goes without saying, too, that she was miniscule. Even her diaper, the smallest size available, looked gargantuan on her, a cloud that stretched all the way down to her twiggy knees and up to her bony chest, where the four chambers of her heart had yet to fully form. A ventilator breathed on her behalf; her little lungs wouldn’t be able to expand and contract on their own for some time. The glowing isolette was a science-fiction maze of plastic tubing and electrical wire: intravenous lines, catheters, electro-cardiac monitors. There was even an endotracheal tube, flowing down her throat to a stomach smaller than a shooter marble. All these insertions, incidentally, placed her at heightened risk of lethal infection -- bacterial, viral, or fungal, pick your poison. Her immune system hadn’t quite developed yet, and she was missing two months’ worth of antibodies from Beverly.

We’d been assured by every doctor with whom we’d spoken that almost all babies born at 28 weeks survive. (That foreboding “almost,” that ugly caveat.) But even survival would require two months here in the hospital. Without precise, round-the-clock care, she would die. It was the very thing I’d feared most, the thing I’d been panicking about since Beverly first came to us, since we decided to become fathers. Never mind household hazards or creeps in windowless vans or killer clowns. She might die before we got to all that.

Still, I looked at her, where she lay in her incubator: our baby, born too soon, half-formed and puny, kept alive only by machines and doctors and dumb luck. I looked at her, and no part of me wanted her to remain sick and small. Everything in me, everything I had, wanted her to break out of her little glass shoebox and grow strong and tall and fear nothing. I wanted her to take every risk. I wanted her to go dancing and climb mountains. I didn’t care if she skinned her knees, if she got into playground fistfights, if she wound up in the principal’s office. I wanted her to drive us crazy, keep us up at night. I wanted her to astonish us.

I placed my hand in a rubber glove. I reached for her through the open hatch of the isolette. I pressed a fingertip, feather-light, into the centre of her tiny palm. Her fingers curled around the tip of mine.

And I knew, as I held her hand, that I would never be my mother.

Relief rushed through me like a flood. Richie must have seen it on my face. He brought his chin to my shoulder, pressed a kiss to my temple. The smell of alcohol, I noticed, no longer lingered on his breath. Nothing like eighteen sleepless hours in a hospital to sober a person up.

“So,” he began, “too early to start thinking about names?”

I thought for a second, then shook my head. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Plus, the sooner we name her, the less risk of wrong-patient errors due to indistinct naming conventions.” I rapped a knuckle against the label on her incubator: _Babygirl Tozier-Kaspbrak_. “Really, they should diversify these temporary first names. Totally irresponsible.”

“Let’s give her a really tough name, then,” Richie said. “A name that says, ‘Don’t fuck with me, man, I’m two pounds and four ounces of whoop-ass.’”

I laughed, despite myself. “What were you thinking?”

“Something along the lines of, like… Bruiser.”

I laughed again -- louder, this time, than I meant to. “Bruiser? Seriously?”

“Or, I don’t know, Buster.”

“Oh my God.”

And then he went, “ _Butch_ ,” in this deep, guttural growl, and that was it; I couldn’t take it anymore. I slipped my hand out of the isolette and I turned to him and I buried my face and my laughter in his lapel. He put his arms around me, pulled me in close. I took a deep breath of the worn leather of his jacket, lightly scented with stale tobacco, and I felt safe.

“How,” I said, quietly, into his chest, “are you still _this_ funny, even when we’re going through hell?”

“I’m a comedian,” he said. “That’s my job.”

“Lucky me,” I said, and meant it.

I felt his lips, pressed to the crown of my head, tilt into a smile. “Lucky _me_ ,” he said. I could tell that he, too, meant it. “You’re holding it down, man. I thought I’d have to keep _you_ calm, but you’re, like… you’re _zen_ right now.”

I shrugged. “I’m a risk analyst,” I said. “Preparing for the worst? That’s _my_ job.”

“Hey, now.” He lifted his head, looked down at me, serious. “This isn’t the worst case scenario.”

“Right,” I said, immediately, and nodded. “Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry. She’s still here. Still alive.”

“Yeah. She is.” Richie lowered his arms to loop around my waist. I was aware, faintly, that he was holding me the way a man holds a woman on the cover of a Nicholas Sparks novel. Not that I, of course, had any familiarity with the genre. I’d just seen a fair few of them on Myra’s nightstand over the years. “And, uh, I just want to say, for the record: I’m in.”

“Sorry?” I squinted at him. “What does that mean, ‘I’m in?’”

“Better, worse, rich, poor, sick kid, healthy kid,” he said, and took a breath. “I’m all in. I love you. I’m not going anywhere.”

This should have been the easiest thing in the world to answer. All I had to do was lift my head, tell him, “I love you, too,” and the catastrophe of the last two days, that world-ending fight in the cinderblock corridor at the theatre -- it would all be forgotten. Instead, though, I found myself struggling to speak.

“I… I thought…” I swallowed, shook my head. “It’s stupid, but after that whole fight we had, I thought you might, um…” I lifted a hand, brushed a thumb beneath a traitorous tear duct. “I wondered if you would want to leave me. Or… Well. I don’t know.”

“Eddie,” he said, when I’d finished speaking, a look on his face like I’d just socked him in the gut. “Eddie, _no_. Never. Why would you even…”

“Because I’m such a basketcase,” I babbled, “and a total control freak, and I lost my shit and I… I ruined your whole special, and… I mean, I know they ended up having to postpone anyway, because of the baby, but…”

“I thought _you_ were going to leave _me_ ,” Richie said, and that, I’ll tell you, was enough to shut me up. When I lifted my eyes, confounded, he continued: “I was sitting at that bar getting drunk off my ass and just, like, imagining you back at the apartment packing up your shit and driving off to Westchester.”

“You really think I’d do something like that?” I said, hurt by the very suggestion. “Richie, why… why would you _ever_ think…”

“I mean, I fucked up,” he said, his voice catching just a touch in his throat. “And I clearly hurt you. Badly. Like, you were a wreck at that dress rehearsal. I’ve never seen you so mad. So I figured, like, maybe this is it. Maybe he’s done with me.”

“You really don’t know how much I love you, huh?” I said, wondering aloud. “You have absolutely no idea.” He looked at me, confused, and I lifted my hand, touched his face. “There’s nothing you could do, Richie, nothing, no shitty joke you could tell, that would ever make me want to walk out. If we fight, we fight. And then we fix it. I’m not fucking leaving.” I breathed out. “I love you. I’m in.”

He looked at me, then, so tenderly, so hungrily that I thought he was going to lean in and kiss me on the mouth, right there in that cramped, low-lit NICU. I was so convinced of this that I actually closed my eyes, waited for it. But when a few seconds had passed, and I didn’t feel his mouth on mine, I blinked. I looked down. Richie, inexplicably, had sunk to the floor, halfway between crouching and kneeling. He fumbled in his pockets -- a hand dipping down to his jeans, another rooting around in his lapel -- and he muttered under his breath, “Son of a bitch, swear I had it…”

“Richie?” I said. I was a little hurt. I’d thought we were having a moment. “Did you drop something?”

“No, I think, I… _fuck_ , I must have left it back at the theatre, or…”

“Mr. Tozier?” said a voice -- a nurse, approaching us, fresh diaper in hand. “Mr. Kaspbrak?”

I reached down, giving Richie a hand up. The nurse gave us an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting something,” she said, eyeing me, in particular; I’d clearly been crying.

“Not at all,” I said, and sniffled, trying to straighten out my face -- a stiff upper lip, you know, to meet whatever bad news she’d come to give us. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, your daughter’s doing very well, holding steady,” she said. “I actually came to ask if _you_ were all right. You two look like you haven’t slept a wink.”

I eyed Richie. The dark circles beneath his eyes, I’ll admit, were approaching raccoon territory. I could only imagine how depleted I looked; I’d missed one morning and two evening skincare routines while standing vigil here at the hospital.

“Yeah, we haven’t had a chance to go home yet,” Richie said. “We’re just living on caffeine and adrenaline at this point.”

He was expecting a laugh, but the nurse looked down her nose at him. “You’d better get some rest,” she said, seriously, “or else we’ll wind up treating _you_.”

She gave us a disapproving glare that as good as banished us from the NICU, and after a moment’s deliberation, we decided to take the elevator up to Bev’s room, where, at least, we could take a shower and catch some vertical shut-eye in the plastic chairs at her bedside.

As the elevator doors slid closed before us, Richie lifted an arm over my shoulder and pulled me to his side. I rested my head against his chest, sighed out loud.

“One day down,” I said.

I was expecting some kind of commiseration, an acknowledgement of our shared weariness. Instead, I watched his face crack into a grin, watched his eyes crinkle at the corners, brim with water

“God, Eddie, we get to do this forever,” he said. “Every day, for the rest of our lives. You and me and her.”

I felt a tear fall from his eye, splash against my forehead. If I hadn’t stashed the ring in my bedside table when I’d come home from the dress rehearsal, furious, I’d have sunk to the grimy floor of the elevator and asked him to marry me, then and there. In the absence of a ring, though, there was nothing to do but rise up on my tiptoes and kiss him. Just kiss him, and be kissed by him, closing our eyes against the blue light of the lift. I’d not slept in damn near 48 hours -- neither had he -- but here we were, wide awake, steady on the spot, like pugilists. We’d survived, our daughter had survived, and Bev, up in her room, recovering from the birth, had survived. Nothing could hurt us. I’d have liked to see anybody try.


	13. Richie, One Day

So, look, it had been a pretty fucked up 48 hours. Not the worst weekend of my life by any means -- nothing was ever gonna beat going to war with a clown in a sewer -- but I was past due for some shut-eye, I’ll just say that. You’d be tired, too, if you got into a catastrophic fight with the love of your life the day before you were due to tape your $2.5 million Netflix special, only to postpone said taping indefinitely because your best friend went into labor two months early and your firstborn daughter arrived without a fully formed heart or functional lungs, so you had to rush to the hospital while extraordinarily drunk to watch over your tiny little baby in her tiny little incubator, and also worry about your best friend recuperating from the birth up in her solo suite all zonked out on painkillers, and also reconcile with your boyfriend after the aforementioned catastrophic fight, but when you tried to propose to him you found yourself foiled, because you’d left the ring in your dressing room, like a fucking idiot.

But like, set all that aside for a second. In the midst of all this insanity, it’s important that we not lose sight of one very important detail: Kay McCall had been here at the hospital this entire damn time. She had not gone home. She had not taken a shower. She had not slept. We’d left her at Bev’s bedside when we first went down to the NICU, and when we came back up, however many hours later, she was still there, squinting at a paperback in the low light of Bev’s monitors.

Now, listen. _Listen_. I’d had my suspicions about Bev and Kay for a minute now. Ever since that night they both came to my open mic. Remember? When Kay was all like, “Hands off my wife!” and Bev was all like, “Don’t tell Richie how we used to make out!” and then she got all giggly and blushed like a grade schooler? Every time I’d brought it up since, Bev had been like, “Seriously, Richie, don’t read into it, nothing happened, girls do dumb stuff like that all the time,” but I knew, I _knew_ , deep down in my soul, that these two were five seconds from scissoring. All they needed now was a little push. You know, some encouragement from yours truly.

I mean, Bev had just given birth to my firstborn. Getting her laid was the least I could do.

So when we strolled into Bev’s room at a quarter past four in the morning and Kay was still there, reading that book, like I said, I had to needle her. Just a little. I couldn’t not.

“Kay! Hey!” I whisper-shouted. “How’s the wife?”

She looked up, blinked, dazed as hell. “The wife?”

I nodded at the bed, where Bev was snoozing away on a steady morphine drip. “The missus,” I said. “Remember? That night at the open mic?”

“Oh!” She brightened a little, laughed, smacked her forehead. “Right, yeah, of course. I’d forgotten about that.” Sure, Kay. Whatever you say. “Yeah, my ‘wife’ is fine, thanks for asking. And how’s your baby girl holding up?”

“She’s stable,” Eddie said. “Every doctor we’ve talked to says that babies born at 28 weeks have a 95% chance of survival, so we’re pretty optimistic, and they’ve got her on a regimen of” blah blah blah, whatever, some unpronounceable parade of pharmaceuticals that I couldn’t remember. I knew Eddie was trying to give Kay a medical update, but fuck that. I had work to do. These ladies weren’t gonna matchmake themselves. So I interrupted him.

“You know, Kay, it’s _so_ great of you look out for Bev like this,” I began, fully ignoring the death glare Eddie shot me. He hates it when I interrupt him, but this was critical. He’d forgive me. “She’s so lucky she’s got you in her life.”

“Oh, well, I don’t know about all that,” Kay said, and laughed -- laughing more than usual, I thought. Deflecting? Interesting. Very interesting. “What kind of friend would I be if I didn’t help her out while she was in the hospital?”

“Still,” I said, “you’ve been here, what, eighteen hours?”

She slotted her bookmark into her paperback and corrected me: “I think it’s more like 30 now.”

“ _Thirty_ hours?” I repeated. “Boy, you must _really_ care about her. Not a lot of friends I’d spend thirty hours in a hospital for.”

Eddie -- not before giving me a _what the fuck are you up to?_ side-eye -- cleared his throat and smiled at Kay. “Why don’t you go home and get some sleep? We’d be happy to pay for your cab fare, or…”

“Oh, no, don’t worry about me,” Kay said, and oh, now she was standing up, shrugging her purse over her shoulder and shoving her book into the crowded bag. “Richie’s right. I’ve been here way too long. I mean, what am I doing here? I’m not even family.”

Fuck! No! This was the exact opposite of what I was trying to do! “No, no! Stay!” I rushed. “You’re family! Of _course_ you’re family! Bev loves you!” Kay hesitated, one hand on the strap of her purse. She didn’t say, “What the fuck?” but the look on her sure face did. So I tried to backpedal: “And so do we!”

Eddie turned his head to me, and, narrowing his eyes, shook it. I stopped talking.

“...Thanks,” Kay said, after a too-long moment. “I should really be going.”

“Of course,” Eddie said, and reached for his wallet, pulled out two crisp twenties. “Here. Will this be enough to get you back home?”

“No, no, I can’t take your money.” Kay waved his hand away. “Seriously, looking after Bev is the least I can do. I’m such a trainwreck. She’s always been there for me, picking me up off the floor after bad break-ups, helping me get over douchebags, driving me home when I’ve been too drunk to stand up. Hell, she’s probably saved my life a couple of times.”

“Oh, trust us.” Eddie laughed, under his breath. “We know the feeling.”

“I know,” Kay said, and she tried to laugh, too, but weirdly, she got all teary? She wasn’t crying, exactly -- I’d never seen her cry before, come to think of it -- but looking at her, I felt like a wall was coming down. “Beverly’s told me all about when you guys were kids, and you’d get in trouble with those neighborhood bullies. Wish I’d known her when I was twelve. Would’ve made things a lot easier.” She lifted a hand and started fanning at her face, like she was trying to keep the tears back. “Wow! Don’t know what’s wrong with me today.”

“You’ve had a long day,” said Eddie, apologetically. “It’s all right.”

“I’d better be off,” she said, and made for the door. “You guys don’t want to hear me blubber.”

“No worries,” Eddie said. “Go home. Get some rest.”

“Bev would want you to look after yourself,” I said.

Kay turned, looked back over her shoulder at me, and just for a second, I swore, she gave me this look, these narrow eyes, like, _What the hell is that supposed to mean?_ But I played innocent, rocked back on my heels, gave her a big smile. And then she turned on her heel and stepped out into the hallway. I could still hear her footsteps when Eddie turned to me and hissed, “Okay, what the fuck was all that about?”

I lowered my voice, looked sideways at him. “She’s in love with Bev.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. She’s not…” Eddie began, face all scrunched up, indignant -- and then, like a lightbulb had just pinged over his head, he gasped, and his eyes went wide. “Oh my God. She _is_ in love with Bev.”

“Right?” I said, still whispering, not sure if Kay had made it to the elevator yet. “She’s in love with Bev! And now she’s going to go cry in a cab about it!”

“Do you think…”

“Bev’s in love with her?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes. Hundred percent.”

“Huh,” Eddie said, and crossed his arms over his chest. He looked over, contemplative, to where Bev was sleeping soundlessly. “Do you think either of them has, like… made a move?”

“They used to pretend to be girlfriends,” I said, “and make out in bars.”

“No!” Eddie gasped, delighted -- but then his face fell, and he sighed. “Well, that’s not -- I mean, women do that sometimes. Straight women.”

“If you and I started making out in bars and then went around telling people we were straight --”

“It’s different for guys,” Eddie said. “You know it is.”

“But, like, still,” I said, even though he had a point. “It’s not nothing.”

“It’s not,” he agreed, and then he lifted his hand, pointed at me. “But you’ve got to stop meddling.”

“I’m not meddling!”

“ _Oh, Kay, Bev loves you so much,_ ” Eddie said, and goddammit, his impression of me had gotten really fucking good. “ _She’s so lucky to have you, Kay. Remember that time you called her your wife?_ ”

“Fuck you,” I said, goodnaturedly, and then I draped my arms over his little shoulders, and I started whining: “Come on, Eds. Let’s get them together. They deserve it.”

I had a feeling that wrapping Eddie up in my arms would soften him, make him more willing to go along with my nefarious matchmaking plans, and I was _right_ , because he laughed, and he said, “Fine. Sure. We’ll ask Bev about it in the morning..”

“ _Yes_ ,” I said, and squeezed him tighter. “You and me, man. We’re gonna play matchmaker.”

“Oh, stop,” Eddie giggled, and tilted up onto his tiptoes to kiss me -- but then he wrinkled his nose, reeled back. “Boy, you really smell.”

“Yeah, well, you try staying awake for a zillion hours straight while your premature baby fights for her life and you’re so stressed out you’re sweating like a hog.”

“I _have_ tried that, as a matter of fact,” Eddie said, laughed, and then thumped me lightly, square in the chest. “But I’ll let you have the shower first. I’m nice like that.”

And then he kissed the air in front of me and sent me off to the shower with a little shove.

Bev had this bare-bones bathroom off her suite in the hospital. You know, toilet, sink, yellow plastic curtain dividing the showerhead from the rest. Crucially, though, the shower had a bench and a metal railing -- for old folks, I guess, or people in wheelchairs. But also for me, since I’d been awake and on my feet for God knows how long and my dogs were fuckin’ _barking_ , let me tell you. So I dropped my glasses on the top of the toilet tank and then I shucked my shirt and my boxers and my jeans and I left them in a heap on the floor. They’d get soaked, but who gave a fuck? When I sat my ass down on that little shower bench for old people and the hot water hit my skin, I moaned out loud. Heaven. I fumbled for the plastic pump with its greasy pink soap and I pumped some into my palm. Then I started scrubbing at my danger zones. You know, the pits. The groin. The ass-crack.

I’d just stood up, reluctantly, to wash said ass-crack, when Eddie walked up behind me. I mean, I couldn’t see shit without my glasses, but I had to assume it was Eddie, because if anyone else was walking up to me naked and looping their arms around me in this shower stall at half past four in the morning, that’d be fucked up.

“Fancy meeting you here,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said, and sighed, and rested his curly little head down between my shoulder blades. “I just couldn’t wait.”

“Yeah.” I smiled to myself as he hugged me closer. “I bet you couldn’t.”

He laughed, pressed a kiss to the root of my neck, and then we stood for a second -- him holding me, rocking us back and forth under the jets. I was just wondering if I should get out of his way and let him wash up when one of his quick little hands slipped down and brushed up against my dick.

“Damn, Eddie,” I hummed -- exhausted, yeah, but not disinterested. “You wanna bone down? Right now?”

His hand, immediately, shot back up. “Oh, I wasn’t…”

“Yeah, you were,” I interrupted, swiveling to face him, and laughed. “You totally were.”

“I wasn’t --”

“You were trying to get some in a handicapable hospital shower,” I jeered. “Admit it.”

“I have no ulterior motives.” He lifted his hands, defensive. “I just came in here to take a shower.”

“Yeah, a naked shower,” I said, and pulled him to my chest, kissed him on the crown of his head. “With your boyfriend.”

“Are we really still saying ‘boyfriend?’ Are we twelve years old?”

“Fine,” I said. “With the father of your child.”

“...Fuck,” he said, softly.

Got him.

Just like that, we melted into each other. We were, both of us, too tired to talk, but also, I think, too full to the brim of feelings not to touch, and kiss, and make each other feel good. I wasn’t expecting it to be the best sex of our lives or anything. Like, we were crammed into this tiny shower stall, both of us way past exhausted, running on fumes. But somehow, it ended up being one of those times I’d remember for ages, a memory I’d return to anytime I was out on tour and Eddie wasn’t with me and I missed him. I’d lie back in my hotel bed in whatever flyover city and close my eyes and wrap my hand around my cock. I’d remember how it felt that early morning, Eddie clinging to me in the shower as I found his shaft and circled my palm around it, squeezed. The way his fingernails dug into my back. How he muffled his face against my chest so I almost couldn’t hear him moaning under the hiss of the shower. There had always been some anxiety in the way we’d fucked each other before, but there, in that shower stall, neither of us gave a shit about impressing the other. We weren’t acting, or even really trying. We were just holding each other, at the tail end of a brutally long and difficult weekend, at the tail end of a brutally long and difficult forty years. Just wringing orgasms out of each other because we’d made it, because we could.

He came in my hand. I spread my fingers out. “You came a lot,” I murmured, turning my hand over and over, watching his come stream between my knuckles, down the drain. “Wow. You really needed that.”

He didn’t answer. Or, I mean, he did, but not in words. He sank to his knees and he tilted his forehead against the ridge of my stomach. I watched him for a second, kind of awestruck, as he mouthed at my cock, his hands spread out over my thighs. He’d screwed his eyes shut to keep out stray suds, so he looked like a blind baby bird down there, his mouth opening and closing, searching for the right spot. Which is why I told him, “Eddie, you look like a blind baby bird down there.”

“Oh, fuck you,” he muttered into my pubes. “I’m trying my best.”

“No, no, no,” I said, and lifted my hands, held his head between my palms. “It’s pretty fucking sexy, actually. Just… let me help you out, okay?”

He nodded, so I combed my hands through his hair -- too short, wish he’d grow it out longer, because I wanted to tug on his curls, hear the sounds he’d make when I did. I settled, instead, for guiding him gently to where he wanted to be, where _I_ wanted him to be. When he finally took my cock in his mouth, _fuck_ , heaven. I let out a gasp and tasted warm water.

I wasn’t going to last long. He was hungry, deliberate, moving like he’d caught a second wind just for this. His tongue was so quick -- how, when we were both so tired? -- and so good, too, at lingering, pressing harder, where I was most sensitive. He knew my body so well, knew _me_ so well. It all hit me then, like… how unlikely this was, how amazing, after all the shit we’d been through. We were together. We were safe. He loved me, and I loved him, and we’d made something together, a little family. I caught myself tearing up, had to bite back a pathetic whimper. And then I came in his mouth.

I helped Eddie back up to his feet, noticed a little droplet of come at the corner of his mouth. When I reached out to brush it away, he opened his mouth, let me see the little pool of white come resting on his tongue. Then he threw his head back. And he made damn sure that I saw him swallow, every muscle in his neck tensing up and then going slack.

“Jesus,” I moaned, and pulled him to me, kissed him hard. I could still taste little traces of my come on his tongue. I liked that, the idea that a little piece of me would linger inside of him after we had sex. The two of us opening up and moving into each other, leaving our marks. Like dogs pissing on trees, or whatever. I don’t know. That’s not a very romantic metaphor, but hell, you try coming up with a romantic metaphor when you’ve been awake two days straight.

“I love doing that,” Eddie said, against my mouth. “Love sucking you, love swallowing you.”

“I love it, too,” I told him, all jokey. “What a wild coincidence.”

“No, I… listen.” He took my chin in his hand, leveled his eyes at me. “I love having sex with you. I love it. I don’t want to be ashamed of it anymore. Tell anyone you want. Put it in your act. Tell the whole world how good it feels when you come in my mouth and I drink you up.”

I lifted my hand, brushed a stray bit of hair out of his forehead, tried to keep my eyes on his. I was very tempted to, like, grab him and mash my mouth up against his, or even go for an improbable Round Two. But I had something more important to say first.

“Eddie,” I began, cautiously, “you spent a lot of time in hospitals when you were growing up, right?”

He blinked. Whatever he’d been expecting me to say, it wasn’t that. “Um, yeah,” he said. “I was always in and out.”

“Do you think, um…” I cleared my throat. “Maybe you have some kind of, like, thing? For hospitals? Like, a sex thing? Because I have _never_ seen you this horny.”

“Oh my God,” he said, and pulled away from me, clapping both hands over his face. “ _Why_ would you…”

“It’s cool if you do!” I called out. “I think it’s pretty common!”

“I’m going to bed,” he said. “I can’t deal with this right now.” And then he threw back the curtain and stomped over to the sink, all huffy.

I lingered behind for just a second, laughing under my breath and enjoying another few seconds of the hot spray. When I finally stepped out, I saw that Eddie had folded up my clothes neatly and set them on top of the toilet in a tidy pile, my glasses on top. I was very touched, very endeared by Eddie’s abiding love of cleanliness. And… oh. _Oh_. Of course! How could I have been so stupid?

I turned, tapped Eddie on the shoulder. He stopped what he was doing -- buttoning up his shirt -- and he scowled at me. “What is it?” he said, in a low voice. “What do you want now?”

“You love being clean!” I said, all excited. “You love making things clean!”

He tilted his head, baffled. “The hell are you talking about?”

“Hospitals aren’t your sex thing,” I said. “ _Showers._ Showers and baths. That’s your sex thing.”

His mouth hung open. “Oh,” he muttered, and then his brows flew up, and he looked down at the floor, and he said, “Oh, wow. Yeah. I’d never really thought… _Huh_.”


	14. Beverly, Two Days

I expected to see Kay when I woke up. I won’t lie: I was disappointed when I didn’t. Every other time I’d blinked myself out of sleep, she’d been right there, without me so much as turning my head. She’d proffer ice chips, brush my hair out of my eyes, fluff my pillows. It was more than I deserved, of course. It wasn’t as though I was on death’s door, for Christ’s sake. I was just another woman hubristic enough to think she could pull off pregnancy in middle age with zero complications. When I thought about how long Kay must have waited at my bedside, how long and dull those hours must’ve been, I couldn’t help but feel some guilt. I hoped she’d gone home to get some sleep of her own. Wouldn’t want her running herself ragged on my account.

The second thing I noticed, after Kay’s absence, was a kind of clarity in my head. Some of the fog had lifted. That was nice. But I was newly aware of my body, too, with all its fresh aches and pains. I didn’t remember the birth at all, high out of my mind for most of it, so it was strange, now, to feel its residue. My hips felt as if they’d been torn up and stitched back together. The skin there seemed fragile, too, paper-thin. Like all my organs would pour through the new seams if I so much as sat up. Maybe I’d try some less ambitious movement first. Could I turn my head? I tilted my neck, just a little, to the left. Managed it fine. My eyes fell on Richie and Eddie, dozing upright in the cheap plastic chairs lined up against the wall.

God, but they loved each other. Like something out of a Normal Rockwell print, honest. It was the way they slotted into one another: Richie’s shoulder a pillow for Eddie, Eddie’s soft pate serving as the same for Richie. That worn-out old motorcycle jacket Richie never took off -- it was a blanket, now, for the both of them. If I squinted, I could see their chests rising and falling faint below the fabric. They breathed in time. Eddie’s arm fell into Richie’s lap and Richie’s hand settled over it. Even in their sleep, each couldn’t help but reach for the other. I wondered if I’d ever find a love like that.

Just like Norman Rockwell. Yeah. If he’d been gay.

That thought set me off laughing. I regretted it right away, this laughter. The sharp heave of my diaphragm fired off a round of explosives along the ragged rows of my stitches. _Christ_ , the pain. Worse yet, the sound made Eddie stir, which, of course, made Richie stir, and then, just like that, they were yawning themselves awake, the Rockwell painting dissolving.

“Bev? Is everything…” Eddie began, before yawning hugely around the word “...okay?”

I snorted. “You two are so in love,” I said. “Like a couple of schoolboys. Holding hands in your goddamned sleep.”

“Glad to see someone’s back to her old snarky self,” Richie said. Then he lifted his arms up and over his head for one of those sprawling early morning stretches. I caught a brief glimpse of the broad frontier of his hairy belly and averted my gaze before I could see more. That was for Eddie’s eyes only. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I got run over by a truck,” I told him, truthfully.

“We’ve met the culprit,” Richie said. “She’s definitely not truck-sized. Maybe Tonka.”

“Aww, I’m a little jealous,” I said, and grinned. “I still haven’t even seen her.”

“Eddie’s got about seven hundred photos on his phone,” Richie said. “He can show you some.”

“When the hell did you have time to take all those pictures?” I stared, baffled, at Eddie. “How many days have I been asleep?”

“Two,” Eddie said, proudly. “She’s two days old.”

“And handling it like a champ,” Richie said. “Our little Bruiser.”

“Bruiser?” I asked.

“It’s just a placeholder,” Eddie explained. “We haven’t landed on a name yet.”

Richie nodded. “Right now, it’s between Bruiser, Buster, and…” He dropped his voice to a low growl: “ _Butch_.”

I laughed; couldn’t help it. “Great choices,” I said. “I think I like Butch best.”

“You _would_ ,” said Richie. It sounded like a dig, but I didn’t get it. Didn’t understand, either, why Eddie drove an elbow, none too gently, into Richie’s side just then, and told him, “Behave.” I must have winced in sympathy or something, because a second later, Eddie was at my bedside with a paper cup. Ice water. I took a grateful sip. Then I asked, “You wouldn’t happen to know where Kay’s gone, would you?”

Eddie turned his head to Richie. They gave each other a set of funny looks -- another one of their conversations-without-words, I guess. When Eddie turned back to me, there was something strange, a little surprised, in the way he spoke. “She went home to get some rest,” he said. “I’m sure she’ll be back soon.”

“She was here for, like, thirty hours straight, by the way,” Richie said. “Just sitting at your bedside like some kind of war widow.”

I squinted at him. “Wouldn’t I have to be dead,” I pronounced, slowly, “for her to be a war widow?”

“Or whatever the alive version of a widow is,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“‘Wife,’ Richie,” I said. “The word you’re looking for is ‘wife.’”

I laughed, and I waited for Richie to laugh, but he didn’t. He just shot Eddie another one of those private looks; Eddie, by way of reply, nodded. I couldn’t quite parse it, but there was something awfully smug about the whole exchange.

Eddie set a hand on my arm. “We’ve been meaning to ask, Bev,” he said. “How are things between you and Kay?”

“What are you talking about?” I glanced from him to Richie, baffled. “She’s my best friend. We’re fine. Why?” Alarm rose up in me, sudden. “Oh, Christ, did she say something to offend the two of you? I know she’s got a weird sense of humor, and she might’ve said something a little off-color about gay marriage, or…”

“Oh, no, no, no, nothing like that,” Eddie cut in, quick. “It’s just, well… you two really seem to care about each other.”

“And she never shuts up about how beautiful you are,” Richie chimed in, “and how great your tits look, and how fun it is to make out with you…”

Oh, God. This shit again. But now he’d managed to rope Eddie into harassing me.

“Fuck’s sake, Richie,” I grumbled, and nestled deeper into my pillows. “Thought I told you to drop it.”

Richie, to my chagrin, did not drop it. “So it doesn’t mean anything at all that she threw her arm around you and said, like, ‘Leave me and my wife alone,’ or whatever?”

“She was _joking_ , Richie.”

“And your whole long and illustrious history of kissing each other…”

“Oh my God,” I groaned. “Show me a straight girl who hasn’t kissed a friend at a bar once or twice.”

“Look, Bev,” Eddie began, and oh, God, I could hear it in his voice already, how smoothly he was sliding into the role of good cop. “Me and Richie, we both have some recent experience with realizing new things about ourselves, and our sexualities, and…”

“Good for you,” I interrupted. “I’m straight.”

Eddie smiled the smuggest smile he’d ever smiled. If I hadn’t been so damn weak, I’d have slapped it right off his face.

“I know it can be hard sometimes,” he said, gently, “to confront these feelings, and think about what they mean, but…”

“Eddie. _Please_ stop talking.” I burrowed into my blankets and wished, bad, for a cigarette. I could have one, now, couldn’t I? Since I wasn’t pregnant anymore, since I wouldn’t be breastfeeding? I’d have to ask a nurse. “I just had a baby. That should be your first clue that I’m not gay.”

Eddie was just backing off, giving me a steady stream of, “Okay, sure, no worries, we don’t want to push…” when Richie interrupted with, “You know what? No.” Eddie stepped back, tried to block his path, but Richie was already stomping across the room. “She’s in love with you!” Richie shouted, and brought an open palm down on my mattress, hard. “Why the hell do you think she sat here for thirty hours straight worrying herself fucking sick about you?”

“Because she’s my best friend!” I shouted right back. “And she’s straight, too! Or did you miss her New York Times bestselling memoir about all the guys she’s fucked?”

Richie laughed, a little cruelly. “Just like my entire career telling jokes about all the women I’ve fucked, yeah?”

“Let’s all take a second to calm the fuck down,” Eddie said -- the _fuck_ proof positive that he was running just as hot as Richie and I. “Nobody’s accusing anybody of anything.”

“How am I supposed to calm down when you two come in here calling me a lesbian?” I said. “I just gave birth! To a baby! Your baby! You think I could’ve made that baby if I was gay?”

“I think you dumped Ben,” Richie answered, “and moved in with a woman, and now she calls you her wife and sits by your bedside in the hospital for thirty hours at a stretch.”

I was silent, sucking my teeth. Up ‘til now, I’d really considered this whole line of Richie’s -- that I was, deep down, unbeknownst even to myself, a lesbian, and that Kay wanted to jump my bones -- to be pure horseshit. It was a conspiracy theory, a bit of teasing colored by his own recent sexual revelation. He’d been stacking tall mountains up out of molehills. None of it meant anything. Kay had opened her home to me because I was her friend and I needed help. We’d played wives and girlfriends at bars over the years to ward off sex pests. Years ago, when we’d kissed at those same bars, it hadn’t meant anything. We’d been broke, worn-out from long shifts of shit-work, blowing off steam. The way I’d felt kissing Kay was completely different from the way I’d felt with men. With Tom. With… with my…

With my father.

“Am I wrong?” Richie said. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

I closed my eyes, as if that would shut out my thoughts along with my sight. Instead, the memories -- bad ones -- bloomed. I’d been doing a lot of dreaming lately, under morphine’s steady hand, so my recall was sharper, more vivid. The first time my father had touched me, and the last. The cruelty of all the girls, the unruly desire of all the boys. The reek of damage that warded off all comfort and companionship, and the way I’d worked, once I’d left Maine, once I’d aged out of foster care, to conceal it. To pretend that I was normal. That there was nothing wrong with me. That my father hadn’t destroyed me.

“You know, I… I still think I can find the right one,” I said. I opened my eyes, saw Richie and Eddie’s confusion, and clarified: “The right man, I mean. I don’t think I’ve entirely failed in that department.”

“I don’t think Richie meant… to insinuate…” Eddie said, hesitating as he spoke, “that what happened with Ben was in any way your fault, or…”

“It’s actually really offensive, what you’re doing,” I said. “This whole idea that I was abused my whole life, so I _must_ be gay, right? My dad raped me, my husband beat me, so I’d better just give up on men altogether.”

“ _No one_ is saying that,” Richie interrupted me, emphatic. “All of us, everybody in this room, we’ve all got heinous shit we’ve had to deal with. I’ve had plenty of sex with women that I straight-up didn’t want to have, and Eddie only just finalized the divorce with…”

“Wait.” Eddie interrupted, genuinely startled. “How the hell do you know about the divorce?”

Richie went silent, mouth opening, closing, like a fish’s. “Um,” he said, with a desperate look in his eye. “I’ll… tell you later?”

I could sense from the way Eddie stood that he was about to haul Richie into an argument. I would’ve -- should’ve, maybe -- just let them bicker, distract themselves into a change of subject, but I was mad. And I had points to make, dammit. So I talked over them.

“Respectfully,” I said, voice steely, holding back embarrassing tears, “neither of you have been through anything even remotely like what I’ve been through.”

They went silent, both of them. Richie looked chastened, an occurrence so rare that I hardly recognized his face expressing the feeling.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie said. “Truly. We all went through the same thing with It, but that doesn’t mean… I… I’ll never understand, Bev, what that was like. With your father, your husband.”

“Yeah,” said Richie. “Can’t even imagine.”

“I know,” I said. “And I don’t expect you to.”

“We only brought this up because it seems clear to us that you really care for Kay,” Eddie said. “And she obviously cares for you, too, on a very deep level.”

“Yeah. She’s my best friend.” I laughed, but the tears were still welling up, damn it. “I don’t want to mess that up. I don’t have a ton of female friends.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” said Richie, something new occurring to him. “Even when we were little, the girls just tortured you, right?”

“Yep. Called me a slut, spread awful rumors about me.” I sighed. “Wasn’t like I already felt all dirty and fucked up from what my dad did to me. They just _had_ to rub it in.”

“Well, the boys were pretty awful about it, too, weren’t they?” said Eddie. “I mean, this one, even.” He pointed to Richie, who once again looked chastened.

“I do apologize for saying that the list of boys you’d kissed was longer than my wang,” he said. “If it’s any consolation, I had a very small wang at the time.”

I laughed, and while it did hurt, still, to laugh, it was something of a relief this time. “Yeah, well, at least the boys’ attention felt a little bit like love, right? Like, there was some real desire behind it. None of the girls would have anything to do with me, but the boys wanted to be around me. Even though I hardly ever actually wanted the boys back.” I stopped, realizing what I was saying. “Oh, Christ. I’m not making a great case for my own heterosexuality right now, am I?”

“No, no, what you’re saying makes sense,” said Eddie. “It sounds like you don’t trust women all that much.”

“No,” I said. “I guess I don’t.”

“But you trust Kay,” said Richie.

“I do,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

Richie nodded. “And you -- I’m sorry, it bears repeating -- have made out with her on multiple occasions.”

I rolled my eyes. “How many times do I have to tell you it didn’t mean anything? Straight girls kiss each other all the time.”

“You know, I used to be really jealous of those girls,” Richie said. “I would’ve loved an excuse like that. Like, ‘Oh, don’t mind me, I’m just kissing this guy so those girls will think I’m hot.’”

“It’s interesting, that word, ‘excuse,’” Eddie said. He sounded less like a finance man and more like a psychotherapist. Maybe he had a future in it. “Maybe some straight women do kiss each other solely to attract men, but I’m sure some women do it because it’s… I don’t know, a kind of mechanism of plausible deniability.”

“Listen to this guy,” Richie said, and rolled his eyes, good-naturedly, at Eddie. “‘Mechanism of plausible deniability.’ What does that even mean?”

“You’re right. We can just say ‘excuse.’ That’s easier.” Eddie laughed a little, under his breath, then returned his gaze to me. “Those times with Kay, Bev -- do you think you ever used ‘this doesn’t mean anything’ as an excuse? To deny something you really felt?”

It was a hideous, invasive question. I didn’t want to answer it, because I would, of course, have had to say _yes_. But it was a complex _yes_. A _yes_ that forced me to dig tunnels through my memory to moments I’d very deeply and deliberately buried. I’d never told Richie, because I’d never told anyone, but there had been one time, one night, when Kay and I had ventured far beyond kissing.

We’d been out at a bar, sometime in our early twenties, celebrating Kay’s recent cover story for the _Reader_ , when this creep some forty years our senior, silver-haired, had begun hitting on us, hard. We settled into our usual routine: we were lesbians, we weren’t interested, and we wanted him to beat it. When he’d persisted, Kay laid one on me. She was convincing enough that the guy wandered off, scowling, muttering under his breath about _these fucking dykes_.

The trouble really began, though, when another guy came over -- our age, with kind eyes and curls the color of copper -- to chat us up, congratulate us on ridding ourselves of the creep. He bought us beers. He told us his sister was gay, so he knew how hard it must be for us. It might have been a line, but I believed it at the time. He was, genuinely, nice. Precisely Kay’s type, too: a sensitive, artistic guy, a little shy, with a slender frame and a bookshelf back home full of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.

I know this because we wound up at his place, and I saw that bookshelf, all those Russian novels. We’d never done this before, both of us going home with the same guy, and we only did so to prop up the elaborate architecture of our initial lie. When Kay realized that she wanted to fuck this guy, and that he was under the mistaken impression that she was a lesbian, she hauled me off to the bathroom at the bar. We put our heads together. We came up with a story: Kay was, in fact, bisexual; we were in an open relationship. When we returned to our stools, the guy bought this story, nodded as we explained. I, not wanting to spoil Kay’s fun, told the guy that I was a full-bore lesbian, that I never slept with any of the men Kay saw. And I was just about to excuse myself, too, drive home from the bar, leave Kay to her dalliance, when the guy asked, “So you just like to watch?”

“Yeah,” Kay answered for me. “Exactly.” And then she turned to me, before I could protest, and whispered, “Roll with it.”

A cab ride later, we found ourselves in the guy’s studio apartment. He served me a glass of wine. I held it, not taking a single sip, as he and Kay tore each other’s clothes off and tumbled to the bed. My job, I’d assumed, was to stay out of the way, let Kay do her thing. “You can, like, rub one out if you get bored,” she’d said, in the cab over, as I whispered to her, asking what I was supposed to do while they fucked. “I don’t mind.” It seems insane in retrospect, but I’d really assumed we’d laugh about it later: the time I posed as her lesbian lover so she could get some dick.

And so, for a long few minutes, I perched in an armchair in the corner, averting my eyes to the bookshelf as Kay and the guy both grew progressively more naked. I was just wondering if I shouldn’t go over and select a volume, maybe give “War and Peace” a try, when the guy -- who, honestly, was kind of a sweetheart, a real puppy-dog, probably just as inexperienced with threesomes as we were -- lifted his head and asked me, “Are you all right?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. Please.”

“I mean, I want you to have fun, too,” he said. “If you want, you can come over, and we could… share, maybe?”

Why did I tell him yes? Or, rather, why’d I say, “Sure, yeah,” as casually as if he’d offered me another glass of wine? I couldn’t tell you why I set my glass down, crossed the floor to the bed, and put my lips on Kay’s -- only that I did. I wanted to do it. I’d seen her naked before, of course, countless times, wandering back and forth from the shower in our shoebox apartment. She was not modest. But I’d never touched her naked body, never taken her nipples between my fingers and teased them as I did now. She’d been surprised, I remember, but eager, too, egging me on. “Take a bite,” she’d said, and I’d given her a gentle, experimental kiss on the tip of her breast. She got all huffy: “A _bite_ , I said.” I obeyed, bit her nipple. I liked it.

He fucked her in reverse cowgirl -- for my benefit, he said. “This way, your girlfriend can still play with you,” he said to her. And so she rode him, but she faced me, and I kissed her, and ran my hands over her small tits, and licked at her nipples like a starved kitten. I had all my clothes on. Nobody was touching me. I wasn’t even touching myself. I could only justify this if it remained all about her. Making her feel good, you know. This was just an extension of our game of make-believe. It was funny; I almost felt comfortable. More comfortable, certainly, than I’d ever felt with any man. Because Kay and I were friends, I figured. Maybe that was it, the big secret: sex was better if you were friends with the people you fucked.

Too bad the men who befriended me usually weren’t after friendship.

I was surprised when I saw that Kay was touching herself. It had never occurred to me that this was possible, to fuck someone and fuck yourself at the same time. But there she was, stroking the small bud of her clitoris with her fingertips as she bounced in this stranger’s lap. I reached down and replaced her hand with my own. Like it was nothing. Like I did this every day. I felt her gasp into my mouth when I touched her, licked up every moan that poured out of her. When she came, not quietly, I kept kissing her through it. I would have forgotten there was a man involved at all, had the guy not called out, “Oh my God, I’m gonna come.”

Kay pulled away from me, sharply. “In my mouth,” she said, to the guy, and dismounted, lowering her head to where her pussy had been only moments ago, and where my hand was, still. I stroked her hair absentmindedly for a second or two before I realized that I was, in effect, steering her. Helping her blow this guy. And I felt something, then, some sick combination of the envy I felt and the undeniable arousal that had been building in me all this time.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, and I slipped away, leaving her to her blowjob.

In this guy’s small, tidy bathroom, I locked the door and pulled my underwear down to my ankles. I touched myself the way I’d just touched Kay. I came with a hand over my mouth. I didn’t want him -- or her, especially -- to hear me. I flushed the toilet and washed my hands.

When I emerged, the guy was tugging on his boxers, and Kay was fully clothed. She tossed her hair over her shoulder, smiled at me. “Ready to head out?” she asked me. As if nothing had just transpired. As if we’d paid the tab at dinner and we were headed home now. Mundane. Ordinary.

Two things of note happened afterward. First, we never talked about it. Not in the cab home, not the next morning, not ever. When “The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Off” was published, a tell-all of just about every sexual encounter Kay had ever participated in, that night was conspicuously absent. I never asked her why. Figured she just didn’t remember. I understood that; I’d tried to forget it, too.

Second, I met Tom the following week. He asked me to dinner, and though I’d wanted to say no -- he wasn’t exactly my type, a little older than I regularly went for, with a tremendous beard -- I said, “Sure, yeah.”

I apologize for the long digression. Eddie had asked me if I’d ever used “this doesn’t mean anything” to handwave some physical intimacy with Kay. And the answer was _yes_ , but I didn’t want to leave it at _yes_. I’d never told anybody about that night, that apartment, those Dostoyevskys lining the shelves. Maybe it was time I talked about it. Maybe Richie and Eddie could help me make sense of that night.

And so I began, slow, halting: “Well, actually, this one night…”


	15. Eddie, Three Days

“But you gotta remember,” Richie was saying, in a voice far too loud for a roomful of sick infants, “hand stuff is, like, third base for lesbians. At least. Maybe even home plate.”

He didn’t need me to tell him, but I told him anyway: “What you’re saying is deeply offensive.” 

“Good thing we’re the only people in the NICU right now,” he said. “Unless you’re worried the babies’ precious little ears will be scarred for life.”

“You’re scarring _me_ for life,” I grumbled, and turned my eyes away from him, back to the sight of my baby. Our baby. I watched her, dozing away in her incubator, and I wondered: had she gotten bigger in the past two days? Was that really how quickly they grew? Would I blink and see her standing before me eighteen years old, college acceptance in hand, striding out the door and away from me?” 

“Admit it.” Richie jolted me out of this tragic little fantasy. “You’re just as hung up on the lurid details as I am.” 

I hesitated -- but then, grudgingly, I gave him the nod he’d been looking for. His smile, in response, was almost unbearably smug.

I couldn’t argue with him, though: I’d been absolutely gobsmacked by everything Bev had related to us up in her room. The encounter she’d described -- this casual night of drinking with a friend culminating in sex with the same friend, sex the two of them never spoke about again -- it seemed to come from another planet. One I’d never been to, certainly. What I struggled with most, as did Richie, was her apparently sincere belief that the presence of a man in the room somehow mitigated the gravity of the sex she’d had with Kay. As if he rendered her action less real by his mere presence. Richie and I, as I said, were stuck on this point, wholly unable to comprehend it. Neither of us could imagine ourselves in the same situation. Two men out drinking, approached by a woman, might find themselves readily enough involved in a threesome. They’d have to be men more adventurous than me, of course, but still, it was within the realm of the possible. This, though: the notion that the men of this thought experiment might masturbate one another to orgasm and then continue on with their lives, let alone their friendship, as though nothing at all had happened? Like it was just a lark? I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

I’d known intellectually that the rules of sex were different for men and women -- different, even, for gay men and lesbians. Despite this, though, on a more profound, emotional level, I’d always thought Bev and I had a great deal in common. Both of us had walked through our lives on eggshells, stepping carefully over the detritus of our unhappy marriages, our abusive parents, our fraught relationships with our own bodies. We both knew the feeling of longing for a close friend -- another woman, in her case; another man, in mine. We’d even faced certain death in the same singular, bizarre way. And yet, I had no idea what it was like to be her. I hardly even knew what advice to give her in this situation. Richie’s glib goal -- to “get her laid,” his words, not mine -- had already, it seemed, been met. Bev and Kay had, all those years ago, had sex with one another, and their friendship had smoothed itself over this fact almost instantaneously. The ripples had cleared; the rock had sunk to the pond’s bottom. Now what? 

“We have to get them in a room together and just get them to talk, straight up,” Richie said. “If we invited them over to our apartment and then just, like, locked the door from the outside --”

“We are not going to imprison Kay and Beverly in our apartment.”

“Not even for, like, fifteen minutes?”

“No.”

“Ten?”

“Gentlemen?” A nurse’s voice, interrupting us -- I turned, smiled, hoped she hadn’t heard much.

“Hi!” I said, pushing Bev out of my mind and feigning sunshine. The nurse held a small diaper in her one hand and a smaller bottle in the other. “Time for a diaper change and a feeding, I presume?”

“That’s right,” she said, with an easy smile. “Thought it might be time for you two to take a stab at diapering and feeding your little Butch.”

Oh, this was another thing: at our request, the hospital had changed our daughter’s temporary name from “Babygirl” to “Butch.” This was, mostly, for safety reasons. I hadn’t been kidding when I told Richie that differentiating these placeholder names prevented countless wrong-patient errors. Hell if I was going to let our daughter be mistaken for some other Babygirl and potentially die of an incorrect dosage. Also, privately, I thought it was just hysterically funny. Two gay men -- the only gay couple, by the way, in the revolving cast of exhausted parents frequenting the NICU -- declaring that their daughter would no longer be Babygirl, but Butch? Hilarious. We received measured compliments from the nurses about how evolved, how politically correct and sensitive we were; we just smiled, nodded, and laughed ourselves stupid about it later. 

But I digress. The nurse. The diaper in her hand. She lifted it up: snow-white, with little yellow ducks marching up its lacy borders. “Either of you feel like giving it a go?”

This was my mistake: I hesitated, just for a moment, before I said, “Yes, I’m sure Richie would --” because that gave him time to cut in with a raucous belly laugh, press his hands square into my shoulders, push me gently forward.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” he said. “You don’t get to weasel out of diaper duty.” 

“I’m not trying to weasel out of diaper duty!” I said, incensed, even though I had, absolutely, been trying to weasel our of diaper duty. “I just want to give _you_ the opportunity to --”

“No way. You’re in the army now.” Richie said, and saluted me. “Time to get up close and personal with your kid’s poop.” 

I couldn’t press the argument further without making plain the full extent of my weaseling. And so, a few tense moments later, I found myself smearing sanitizer onto my hands as the nurse unlatched the isolette. In all my careful preparation for fatherhood, all my babyproofing of our apartment, this was the one contingency for which I hadn’t planned. I’d honestly assumed that Richie would be the one doing the diapering. That he’d recognize my deep-seated fear of the fecal and relieve me of this burden. How, how had I deluded myself into thinking this wouldn’t be my job? Did I really think I’d escape fatherhood having never touched baby poo? I couldn’t have strapped even a single diaper onto a stuffed animal as a dry run? No, no, here I was, holding the first of countless diapers, completely unpracticed. The nurse ushered me forward. I took a deep breath. I pinched my nose.

“Nope! No plugging your nose!” the nurse called out. “One hand on the baby at all times. Keeps her from rolling over.”

I looked back at the nurse. “Is she even capable of rolling over right now?”

“No,” said the nurse. “But you’ll want to get into the habit.” 

And so I lowered my hand to my daughter’s tiny torso and made a cradle of my fingers. This forced me to unfasten her present diaper with only one hand, a tall order for a number of reasons: the wires, the tubes, and the not-insignificant fact that this was a living creature who could squirm and wail and kick her twiggy limbs. 

At this last, mundane realization, I had to bite my lip to keep from crying. My daughter! My very own little human being! I could hold her in a single hand now, but she would grow, and grow, and someday, she’d be too big for me to hold, and -- oh, fuck, goddammit, shit, shit everywhere, my entire left hand coated in shit. 

This is what nobody tells you about newborn baby shit: it is liquid. The worst sort of liquid imaginable, actually: sticky, oily, the green-black color of sewage. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it was not this. She was smaller than my forearm; how the _fuck_ had she managed to produce such… such a _quantity_ of… 

“Christ on the cross, Eds,” Richie called out. “Relax. It’s poop. It’s not gonna kill you.” 

The nurse, silent, handed me a wet wipe. I accepted it gratefully. When my hand was clean, and when I’d deposited the soiled diaper into the nearest wastebasket, I tried again. One hand on the baby -- who was squirming now, screaming -- and one hand lifting her tiny bottom to wipe away the odious residue. I was well aware that “odious” was not the most charitable word a father could use to describe his newborn. I didn’t care. I had one goal now, and one goal only: to survive this diaper change.

I really missed five minutes ago, when I’d been tearing up at the mere fact of her kicking her feet. 

The last step in this odyssey was to apply the new diaper. This, I thought, would be easy. Something I could do in my sleep. I unfolded the tiny diaper with its little yellow ducks, slid it beneath her bottom, and --

“You’re doing it backwards,” said the nurse. “Tabs go on the back.” 

“Sorry,” I said, and flipped the diaper.

“Now it’s inside out.”

Richie, the asshole, was laughing out loud, his shoulders shaking with the force of his amusement. As I fumbled helplessly with the diaper, the nurse turned to him, pointed a judgemental finger. 

“Don’t laugh, wise guy,” she said. “You’re on duty next time.” 

Oh, how the tables had turned! After Richie’s upbraiding, I fairly blitzed through the remainder of diaper duty, dodging wires and tubes and soothing my daughter in the softest voice I could muster until, finally, the diaper sat snugly around her torso, the yellow ducks marshalled in tight rows at the sides of her tiny frame. 

“One down,” I said. 

“It’ll get easier every time,” the nurse said. “And her feces won’t always be so…”

But then she had to stop, because Richie, at the word “feces,” had started laughing like a grade-schooler. And after a moment, I couldn’t help myself: I joined in, too. More out of joy than anything else, really. I was so looking forward to fatherhood with him. 

The baby went down for a nap shortly afterward. We decided to follow suit, snatch a half hour or so of vertical shut-eye in the chairs in Bev’s room. On the way to the elevator, I turned my head, looked up at Richie. 

“Butch needs a real name,” I said.

“Yeah, let’s think about that,” Richie said. “What goes with Tozier-Kaspbrak?” 

“God.” I grimaced. “Is _that_ what we’re doing?”

“Or, I mean, Kaspbrak-Tozier,” he said. “I’m not picky about the order.” 

“Either way, it’s just… kind of a mouthful, you know?” 

“So what are we gonna do?” he said. “I mean, if you don’t want to saddle a kid with the double-barrel from hell, which I get.” 

We’d arrived, now, at the elevator. I pressed _up_. 

“I don’t know,” I said, watching the button glow beneath my finger. “I’m fine with her just being a Tozier.”

“Eddie, come on.” Richie cut his eyes at me, a little exasperated. “This isn’t like deciding where to go for dinner. You can’t just be like, ‘Whatever is fine with me. I’ll eat anything. I don’t care what I name my firstborn.’” 

“I’m serious!” I insisted. “I would be more than happy for her to be a Tozier. I never liked Kaspbrak, anyway.”

“Are you kidding?” The elevator doors chimed open. Richie stepped in, looking incredulous. “Kaspbrak is the fucking greatest.” 

“No, it really isn’t,” I said, defiant, walking in after him. “It sounds like a productive cough.” He rolled his eyes, so I coughed, demonstratively, into my fist: “ _Kasp-brak_. See?” 

“But I _love_ Kaspbrak,” Richie whined. “I’ve been writing ‘Richie Kaspbrak’ in my notebooks since I was eight years old.”

I had to give him a kiss for that one. Quick, up on my tiptoes, the corner of his mouth. “Love you,” I murmured, and pressed the button for the seventh floor, the maternity ward. “Do you still have them? I’d love to see.”

“What, my notebooks? Yeah, I’m sure they’re in a box somewhere.” Richie laughed. “There’s just pages and pages of, like, ‘Richie Kaspbrak. Eddie Tozier.’” 

“Eddie Tozier,” I repeated, out loud, and as the elevator lurched upward, something occurred to me. Something I’d never considered before. I had to lean against Richie’s broad side, just for a moment, while I caught my breath. “Huh.”

“You okay?” he said, eyes full of concern. “You just about fainted on me.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

He did not look convinced. “Look, I know we haven’t slept a ton in the past few days…”

“No, no, it’s not that.” I paused, breathed out. “I never liked Kaspbrak.”

“You said that already,” he said. “I think Kaspbrak’s a fine name.”

“My mother...” I began, and faltered -- but I could tell, by the look on his face, that Richie understood. 

“Of course,” he said, and lifted his hand, touched my face, thumb brushing my cheekbone. “Your name is… it’s a reminder of her, isn’t it?”

“It’s like this thread,” I said, “and it’s going to keep me tied to her, like… like I belong to her, still, no matter how far I go or who I become or whatever distance I manage to put between her and me.” 

“Well, um, if you do feel like changing your name…” Richie took in a deep breath. “Your divorce did just go through, so…” 

“Oh, right.” I turned to him -- a little angry, suddenly. He’d blurted this out during our chat with Bev, and I still couldn’t figure out how he’d gotten a hold of the information. “How the hell did you know about that?” 

“I saw your phone and --”

“You went through my phone?” 

“No, no!” His hands flew up, defensive. “I was plugging my phone in on the kitchen counter, and yours was there, too, and an e-mail popped up on the screen, from your lawyer, and the subject line was like, ‘Congrats on finalizing the divorce.’” 

This seemed legitimate enough -- he hadn’t, at least, violated my privacy -- but I was still incensed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Clearly pissed, he laughed out loud. “Why didn’t _you_ tell _me_?” 

“Because I was waiting for the right time!”

“So was I!”

And then, as the elevator doors clicked open, it hit me, the full implications of all the words we’d just exchanged. _If you did want to change your name… your divorce did just go through… I was waiting for the right time… so was I…_

Well, then. The right time had arrived. Right here, right now, in this elevator. I reached for his hands, turned to him. Neither of us made any move to leave the elevator.

“I don’t have the ring with me,” I said, in as steady a voice as I could manage. “It’s at home. I left it in my dresser drawer.” 

“Mine’s back at the theater,” Richie said. “I was planning to, um… the night of the special.” 

I laughed. “Me too,” I said. 

“Well.” Richie breathed out, squeezed my hands. “This is anti-climactic.”

“Yeah,” I said, my heart soaring. “It really is.”

“There’s a chapel on the third floor,” Richie said. “If you want.”

I felt my eyes grow wide. “Right now?” 

“Why not?” 

I stepped away from him, loosed one hand and reached for the panel of buttons. “Third floor?” I asked. 

“Third floor,” he confirmed. 

I pressed the button, and as the doors closed, I returned to him, to the tight loop of his arms. I rose up on my toes and he brought himself down to meet me, and we kissed, softly, gently, hungrily, like the very first time. We didn’t separate until the doors did.


	16. Richie, Four Days

The rinky-dink chapel on the third floor was empty when we showed up. I won’t lie, it really killed the mood we’d built making out in the elevator. We’d rushed in, you know, hand in hand, ready to say our vows and lock lips and stroll out of there as man and… well, not “man and wife,” obviously, but what? Man and husband? Husband and husband? Man and man? Whatever. Didn’t matter. There was nothing to greet us in the chapel but a peeling carpet and a few empty pews and a plain pulpit that looked like it might’ve been made out of plywood. I felt Eddie’s hand go all slack in mine. I heard him say, “Oh, well. Another time, then.” 

And I might’ve agreed with him, just turned around and walked away an unmarried man, but this is the thing: you ever seen “When Harry Met Sally?” I mean, I haven’t. But there was this girl I knew in college who’d hook me up with weed, and she’d seen it. Her favorite movie, in fact. She quoted it to me once, when she wanted to take things to the next level and I didn’t. The way she told it, the guy in the movie -- Harry, I guess, but don’t quote me -- he runs up to this chick on New Year’s Eve and he says to her, like, “Sally, when you want to spend your life with someone, you want your life to start right away.” She said this to me, and she gave me this meaningful look, and I was like, “Oh, no, sorry, I’m only in this for the free weed.” And I meant it as a joke, but I must have hurt her feelings, because the next time I showed up at her dorm room looking for a gram, she was all, “Fuck off, asshole,” and she slammed the door on me. Literally _on_ me. My middle finger got caught between the frame and the hinge. Hurt worse than childbirth. I thought it was gonna fall off and I’d never be able to flip the bird again. I had to go to the E.R. and get this little metal splint for it. It’s still kind of crooked, even today. Never can give anyone the finger quite right.

Sorry, sorry. Got away from myself for a second. Here’s my point: in that moment, holding Eddie’s hand in that tragic excuse for a chapel, all I could think of was that line from “When Harry Met Sally.” So I turned to him, and I went, “Eddie, when you want to spend your life with someone, you want your life to start right away.” And he looked up at me, eyes shining, awestruck, glowing with love, and he opened his mouth to say something -- but then he stopped. His brows dipped in the middle, all suspicious.

“Is that from a movie?” he asked.

“No!” I said, reflexively, and then, a second later, guiltily, as he focused his glare on me: “Yeah.” 

“Which movie?” 

“When Harry Met Sally,” I mumbled, lamely. 

“Oh, right,” he said. “I think you’re misquoting the line a little, though.”

“Probably,” I said. “I’ve never actually seen the movie.” 

He snorted. “That tracks.” 

“I really mean it, though,” I said. “I just… I don’t want to wait anymore. That’s all I wanted to say.” 

“So you still want to get married?” he said. “Today? Right now?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.” 

And with that, we were onto Step #2: find someone with the legal authority to actually get us married. For a while, this was just me speed-walking through the halls of the hospital, hollering, “Priest! Priest! We need a priest!” while I dragged Eddie by the arm behind me, and he was all like, “Richie, stop, cut it out, this is so embarrassing,” but he was blushing the whole time, you know? Smiling like a loon. He liked it. 

And my disruptive tactics worked, too, because a nurse eventually did walk over and tell me to shut up already, the chaplain’s office was right down the hall that way, for crying out loud. And I said, “What’s a chaplain?” And she said, “A priest.” And I said, “Oh, great. Lead the way.” So she did, and we all walked and walked until we came to this tiny little shoebox-closet of an office held by an older lady in a rumpled robe the color of red wine. Now, I was out of breath by the time we got there, on account of all the speed-walking and hollering I’d been doing, so that left Eddie to lay out the gist: we had a preemie daughter in the NICU, neither of us had left the hospital or changed our clothes in three days, and we wanted to get married right the fuck now. 

“Well, of course,” she said, “we can do that,” and she made a move like she was going to scoot back and get up out of her desk, but then she stopped. And she asked us, “You’ve already procured your marriage license, yes?”

Well, shit. No, we hadn’t. Since when do you even need a license to get married? Like, what was this, communist Russia? Iraq under ISIS? (Was ISIS ever in Iraq? One of those I’s has to stand for “Iraq,” right?) Fucking… I don’t know, Cuba? I thought this was a free goddamned country. I gave Eddie a look, a bit of a nasty one: how come he’d never brought up this whole license thing? I mean, he’d been married before. He should’ve known. But he just blinked at the chaplain. “I’d assumed we could just get a license here,” he said, “at the hospital.” And she, the chaplain, gave him a bit of a nasty look, too. 

“You’ll have to go to the Cook County clerk’s office,” she said, slowly, like she was talking to a child, and then she gave us a whole spiel in that exact same tone: if we went out and got the license right now, before the clerk’s office closed at five, we could get married tomorrow. That was the absolute earliest we’d be able to do it, since state law required all couples to wait one day after obtaining a marriage license to get married. Our spur-of-the-moment wedding was not in the goddamn cards. Thanks for nothing, Harry and Sally.

We told the chaplain thanks and then we headed back up to Bev’s room. 

“We could always wait a while to get married,” Eddie said, in the elevator. “There’s no real reason to rush.” 

“I guess,” I said. “I kind of hate not being married to you, though.”

“Oh, I know,” said Eddie. “I feel the same way, believe me.” 

“I’ve wanted to marry you since we were five,” I said. “I had all these elaborate plans. Wedding in the Chuck E. Cheese ball pit. Honeymoon at Disneyland.” 

I waited for him to laugh. But when I looked over at him, he wasn’t laughing. He was about to cry.

“Rich,” he said, in a quiet voice, “do you want a real wedding?”

“Define ‘real wedding.’”

“Flowers, tuxes, a string quartet,” he said, and lifted a hand, thumbed away the beginning of a tear. “Your folks, all our friends, an open bar.”

“I don’t want any of that,” I said, truthfully, “as bad as I want to just… marry you.”

“Really?” he said. “Honestly?” 

“It’d be nice, sure,” I said, truthfully. “But it’s not, like, necessary. The chapel here is fine. Whatever works. City Hall, even.” 

He laughed, a sad one. “Me and Myra got married at City Hall. Didn’t want a big production.”

“What about now?” I asked. “Do you want a big production this time? With me?” 

“You know, Rich, I really did,” he said. “I wanted more than City Hall. I wanted something we’d remember for the rest of our lives.” He paused, worried his lip a little, and when he spoke again, I could hear the cracks forming in his voice. “But I’m tired, Rich. I’m so tired. I don’t want to throw a party. I just want you to be my husband. 

“Eds,” I said, and took his hand in mine, “that’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

I won’t bore you with every single detail, but the next ten or twelve or eighteen hours were a clusterfuck. Turns out planning a wedding -- even a bare-bones wedding in the shittiest chapel known to man -- isn’t easy when you’ve got a newborn in the NICU. 

Thank fuck for Kay, who, by the way, had clearly gone home and gotten some beauty rest since we’d seen her last, because she’d returned to the hospital conspicuously made-up, with her hair blown out all sleek. Plus, I couldn’t help but notice -- and I mean no disrespect in pointing this out; I say it only as someone deeply invested in my dear friend Beverly’s happiness and her lesbian awakening and her future relationship with Kay -- that she was absolutely not wearing a bra. Like. I may not know much about women, but I feel like if your best friend, on whom you’ve got a bit fat lesbian crush and, in fact, with whom you’ve had lesbian sex before, shows up to dote on you in the hospital and she’s done her hair _and_ her makeup _and_ she’s left the bra at home, that’s gotta mean something. 

But enough about Kay’s pokies. We ran into her in the hall, told her about our plan: the clerk’s office, the license, the wedding in the chapel tomorrow. She couldn’t give us a ride to the clerk’s office, could she? “Fuck yeah, I’ll drive you to the clerk’s office,” she said. “What are you waiting for? Let’s go. Chop chop.” 

Since we both had to show up in person to claim the marriage license -- pain in the ass and then some, I know -- we deputized Bev to watch over Butch while we were away. You know, wheel herself down to the NICU, stand guard, and text us right away if there was an emergency. That freed us up to ride over to the clerk’s office in Kay’s convertible, which did have a little ornamental vagina dangling from the rearview. (I gave Eddie a look. He gave me a look right back.) When we finally got to the clerk’s office, things were touch and go for a minute, since we’d shown up a little less than an hour before quitting time. But the guy we talked to took pity on us, rushed us through the whole mess of red tape, and half an hour later, license in hand, we hurried back to the hospital. 

Kay, at the curb out front, stopped us for a second. “You two aren’t going home tonight, are you?” We shook our heads. We’d been planning to sleep in shifts in Bev’s room again, upright in those plastic chairs. “You want me to drive over to your apartment and pick up some suits? Or do you want to get married in the same sweatpants you’ve been wearing for four days?” 

God, I was really, really starting to like her. 

Eddie was all business: “The black Armani suit,” he said, “third from the left when you open the closet, hanging in a navy-blue garment bag. And if you could go in my dresser drawer and pick out a good pair of black socks, and then, in the front closet, I’ve got a pair of black Oxfords -- they’ll say ‘Prada’ on the insole -- and…”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” Kay said, and laughed. “Finer things only. Richie, how about you?” 

“There should be, like, a blue suit on a hanger in my side of the closet,” I said. “And if you can get me a white shirt that’s not too wrinkly, and a tie that goes with the blue suit, and then, um… my dress shoes from the front closet.”

“Which dress shoes?” she asked. 

“I’ve only got one pair,” I said. “They’re brown.”

She lowered her sunglasses, appraising us. “Opposites attract,” she said. 

“They sure do,” said Eddie. “Please bring an iron.”

She nodded. “Got it.”

“Oh, and whatever you do,” I said, “don’t open the third drawer down on the dresser.” 

“Why?” she asked. “Is it full of sex toys or something?” 

“Willow Tree Angels,” Eddie said. “Richie hates them. He won’t let me put them out.” 

“That’s not true,” I protested.

And it wasn’t true, really. I mean, sure, I’d bitched about the angels every chance I got, until one night I got home and found all of them gone. So I went into the kitchen, asked Eddie where all the angels had flown off to. “Oh, I packed them all up and put them in that empty dresser drawer,” he said, chopping potatoes. “Since you were so sick of seeing them around.”

I’d just stood there a second, silent, stupefied. I’d known, of course, that Eddie loved me, but I don’t think I’d known how deeply until just then, standing in the kitchen, absorbing the weight of his sacrifice. I also knew, in that moment, that I loved him even more than I’d thought I did, because all I wanted to do was apologize, haul the angels back out, tell him to put them wherever he wanted. 

So I did, I said all of that, and he said, “Oh, Richie, don’t worry about that,” and he kissed me on the cheek and went back to the potatoes, and the angels stayed in the drawer. 

Anyway, point is Kay went over to our apartment and hooked us up with our suits, and she made a pit stop at her own place, too, and picked up dresses for herself and for Bev, and the next day, at nine o’clock in the morning, when the chapel opened, we rolled up looking like a million bucks. Well, Bev rolled in, at least, Kay pushing her wheelchair, but the rest of us walked, and then we stood around for a minute shooting the shit with the chaplain while Eddie plugged in a laptop. Had to pipe my folks in via Zoom, you know, along with the rest of the Losers. 

I guess this’d be a good time to mention the rest of the club, yeah? You must be wondering what the hell they’ve been getting up to while we babyproofed the apartment and planned our proposals and stayed up all night in the hospital. Let’s start with Ben and Bill. Goes without saying that we didn’t really loop them in on the whole miracle of childbirth. Bev’s call. We respected it. They knew she was having a baby, and they knew we were adopting said baby, but if either of ‘em had any questions about the origins of said baby, they never asked. Hell, for all they knew, me and Eds might’ve poured some sperm into a turkey baster and handed it off to Bev for safekeeping. 

With Mike, we’d been a little more candid. He’d been great about checking in with us, sending us these care packages full of parenting books. And, I mean, I appreciated the gesture for sure, but I hadn’t read a book cover to cover since I was fourteen, at least. Wasn’t gonna start now just because I had a baby on my hands. I mean, wouldn’t that mean I’d have _less_ time to read? Perks and pitfalls of being friends with a professional librarian. 

That was all before Butch actually showed up on the scene, of course. In recent days, we’d been sharing more with the whole circle, Ben and Bill included. And by “sharing more,” I mean I’d spent the last four days spamming the living shit out of the Losers group chat: pictures of Butch in her isolette, GIFs of me feeding her with a bottle the size of a thumb, videos of the kiddo squirming, kicking her legs, opening her eyes. The guys were all polite enough to pretend to be as riveted as I was. Or maybe they weren’t pretending. Maybe they really were fascinated. Crazy to think we’d been in each other’s lives this long. We’d met each other as kids, and now we were having them. 

But back to us, and our wedding. Like, I’m sorry, I don’t want to sell these guys short. They’re my best friends. They’ve saved my ass on multiple occasions. But you came here to read about me and Eds. Get real. You did. And this is the moment you’ve been waiting for, too: the two of us standing at the pulpit, holding hands, listening to the chaplain go, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to blah, blah, blah.” Well, listening, clearly, is the wrong word. I wasn’t listening to shit. I was looking at Eddie. I was thinking how they say your wedding is the first day of your life. But this wasn’t a beginning. Not even close. Our lives were already half-over, just statistically speaking. We weren’t going to get any healthier from here on out. We’d get greyer, fatter. We’d wrinkle more. Our hair would all fall out. That used to matter to me, all that shit. I used to be fucking terrified of getting older, even though my profession’s more forgiving of past-their-prime old white guys than most. But I’d watch the years tick by and I’d wonder if I’d ever have anyone to share them with. Now, I did. I had someone. 

We were getting married today, Eddie and I. He’d kiss me, and I’d kiss him, and we’d sign a sheet of paper, and then it’d all be over, official. At some point, we’d go find the rings we’d bought for each other, and we’d wear them. I’d have to get used to the feel of the metal around my finger, and up against my cheek any time I lifted my hand to set my chin in my palm. I’d never take it off. And when I’d go out and about and people would clock the ring, and say, like, “Blah, blah, your wife,” I’d be like, “Well, actually, my _husband_ …” And oh, God, I’d be smug about the word “husband.” Absolutely insufferable about it. When all this was over, I’d have a _husband_. I’d _be_ a husband. Whoa. I’d be a _loving husband and father_ ; the first line of my obituary, sewn up. Comforting to know, in a way. 

As the chaplain droned on, I let myself think about what they’d look like, all the decades I’d have with Eddie. We’ll spend a few more weeks here in the hospital, of course, while Butch gets big and strong, and then, when she pulls through, when she can breathe on her own and eat without gagging, we’ll bring her home. The nursery’s not quite ready yet -- we thought we’d have a few more months to paint and hang up curtains and shit -- so we’ll have to finish that, too, before she comes home. That’ll be hard, I bet, all those months of early babyhood when she can’t sleep through the night, when she needs to be fed every two hours. But, hey, I’ll have a husband -- a whole entire _husband!_ \-- to help me out, so it won’t be so bad. Eddie will act all self-sacrificing about taking paternity leave, but he’ll be so excited to do it, so proud. He’ll haul us to Sears for family portraits, and he’ll frame them, and when he goes back to work, he’ll put them on his desk, tell anyone who walks into his office, “That’s my husband. That’s my daughter.” 

Which leaves me to be the stay-at-home dad, I guess. Fine by me. Before we know it, she’ll be rolling over, and then she’ll be crawling, and then she’ll be grabbing onto chairs, coffee tables, anything, to haul herself up to standing. And the day’ll come when I get to help her take her first steps -- standing over her, you know, holding her arms up as she toddles forward, one fat little foot, then the other. And then, soon, she won’t need me at all. She’ll just sprint around the house, a holy terror, and I’ll chase after her and try my best to keep her from tripping or bonking her head. I’ll spend so many long days at home with her, playing peek-a-boo and making her laugh, reading board books aloud to teach her colors, animals, shapes, and rocking her to sleep in the early evening while Eddie cooks grown-up dinner. And we’ll sit down and we’ll eat whatever he’s made, and it’ll be delicious, and I’ll tell him all about the day we had, me and the toddler, and he’ll be jealous, so jealous. He’ll take off work whenever he can, come home early, cancel his weekend plans to be with us. He’ll probably sort something out with the higher-ups at the bank, figure out how to work from home some days, so he can be there for the milestones. Her first step, you know. Her first word. What’ll it be? “Dada,” probably. Or maybe something off-the-wall like “giraffe” or “purple” or “Shrek.” Maybe it’ll be “cookie,” and I’ll get in trouble with Eds -- proof positive that I’m plying her with junk food way too often. 

Eddie’s going to be the health-cop dad, of course. No question. He’ll stand over his little blender thing-y putting tender loving care into inedible vegan slurries for her, pureed kale and heirloom carrots and beetroot or whatever the fuck. It’s fine. I can deal. Just as long as he lets us have our sugary cereal and Saturday morning cartoons every once in a while. I’ll handle the low-key fun and Eddie will mastermind all the grander stuff, the swim lessons and the mall Santas and the ballet classes where the kids are too little to really do anything but hop around in tutus. He’ll put her in that little frontways backpack and we’ll all go to the park to see the cherry blossoms in bloom. He’ll paint little rainbows on her chubby cheeks when we go to Pride. Oh, people are going to _love her_ at Pride. People are going to love her everywhere she goes.

Like, at school, say. They’ll love her at school. She’ll be so good at making friends. She’ll share her toys. She’ll never be a bully, and she’ll never let anybody else get bullied. We’ll get the call from the principal’s office and we’ll show up and it’ll be her and some little jerk and we’ll know, right away, that he deserved it. And sure, she’ll get suspended for fighting, and we’ll nod solemnly at the principal, but we’ll stop for ice cream on the way home, tell her to keep on giving ‘em hell, kid. I don’t care if she gets good grades -- Eddie will; I guess one of us should -- but I know she’ll be smart, and good at whatever she winds up loving. Is she going to be a jock, a little _artiste_ , or the class clown, like yours truly? Are we going to drive her to soccer practice, or rehearsals for the school play, or protests downtown? All three? And when she gets older, what’ll we fight about? Curfews? Weed? Boyfriends, girlfriends, they-or-them friends? 

Whatever it is, we’ll show up for all of it. If she’s into sports, we’ll be on the sidelines at her soccer games, handing out carrot sticks and cartons of chocolate milk and cheering her on when she scores. Well, I’ll be cheering. Eddie’s gonna be too busy getting into fisticuffs with the referee. If she wants to go into showbiz, fucking bet we’ll be at those school plays, front row center, standing ovations. I’ll throw plastic roses and Eddie will shoot grainy camcorder footage, trained on her and only her. And if we’ve got a little Greta Thunberg on our hands, I’ll march right alongside her. I’ll get my paints out and we’ll make incendiary signs and we’ll wave them in the cops’ faces. I’ll teach her all the rude chants I remember from protesting Bush back in the day. I don’t know if that’s really Eddie’s scene, but he’ll come along, too, stationing himself at the medic’s tent and worrying himself sick about all the kids he’s bandaging up. 

We’ll make a home together, the three of us. A whole life together. We’ll laugh with our kid when she’s happy and cry with her when she’s sad. We’ll do anything, everything for her. We’ll buy a house, maybe, when she gets older, and we’ll have a backyard. We’ll plant berries, beans, tomatoes. We’ll put out birdfeeders. We’ll make sure she’s curious about the world, good to animals. She’ll beg for a pony, but she’ll settle for a puppy. And on late nights, cold ones, with a fire roaring in the hearth, I’ll settle down in an easy chair and scratch that dog behind the ears. And I’ll look at my husband, lying on the couch with his feet up, still reading the goddamned Economist, and our kid, sprawled on the carpet with an Archie comic, if she takes after me, or her math homework, if she takes after Eds. And I’ll be happy. I’ll be happier than I ever imagined I could be. 

Until that weekend in Derry, at least. When Eddie told me that he loved me. That he wanted to be with me. That he’d follow me back to Chicago and stay with me, forever, for as long as we both shall live. 

And he was telling me again, as we stood there in front of that priest. He was saying, “I do.” 

What could I do but say it back? “I do.” Of course I did.

“I now pronounce you married,” said the chaplain. “You may kiss the groom.”

So I did. I kissed him. I could hear Bev and Kay cheering, and all our friends and my family losing their minds on Zoom, their tinny applause echoing in the world’s tiniest, shittiest chapel. 

Our wedding may not have been a big deal, sure. But the rest of our lives would be. 


	17. Beverly, Two Months

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter goes pretty deep on Bev's history with CSA and domestic violence. Take care of yourselves.

I’ve got a lunch date with Eddie, but only because Richie insisted. “Eddie needs this,” he said -- well, didn’t _say_ as much as _plead_ , on the phone with me, setting this up. “He needs to go someplace that’s not the hospital or the apartment. He needs to, like, go outside. Breathe real air.” How could I tell him no? Butch was, after all, still in the NICU. Her recovery had been a bit rockier than we’d all hoped.

As for me, I’d returned to Kay’s attic after my own brief stay in the hospital to find not much had changed. A funny thing to say, I know, after carrying a baby for nine months, after giving birth. But I had, essentially, found myself back where I started. Still living off Kay’s generosity. Still bushwhacking my way through the most acrimonious divorce in the history of family law. Still wondering if Richie and Eddie were right, if I wasn’t on the cusp of some mid-life sexual identity crisis. Not, of course, that I planned to look for love anytime soon. I still had some weight to lose, some new scars and stretch marks to show for the past nine months. Kay made a point of telling me every time she saw me that I was beautiful, stunning, more gorgeous than ever. I could never quite tell if she was patronizing me or coming onto me. 

She was out of town, actually. Had been for the past few days -- out in Los Angeles, meeting with producers about the film adaptation of her book or some such. That left me to house-sit. This was the official word for what I was doing: “house-sitting,” not “still living in Kay’s attic with no plans to move out and no place else to go.” It’d be aeons before I settled the divorce with Tom. And since most of my assets were tied up in the fashion line we’d co-founded -- just one of the many, many ways in which he’d controlled me -- it wasn’t as though I could afford a down payment on a place of my own. 

I could’ve rented an apartment, maybe, but this is what stopped me: I wanted to be safe. And Kay understood this, and I appreciated her for it. She’d installed new locks, along with deadbolts, on all the doors in her house, including -- and especially -- my suite. Tom had attacked her, too, after all. “I just want you to be safe,” she’d said, showing me how to flip the bolt. I knew she meant it. I didn’t want to lose the great privilege of living with someone who cared about me, who worked actively to keep me out of harm’s way.

But I’d have to leave, at some point. Maybe not right away. Kay’d been having a dry spell ever since she became a celebrity for writing a tell-all about the guys she’d dated. Shocker: men were a little put off by this. I had no doubt she’d be back to her old tricks soon, though, and I’d be ousted by some live-in boyfriend. Unless I… unless we…

No. That wasn’t an option. I wasn’t allowed to think about that. Hadn’t even spoken to Richie and Eddie about it since that day in the hospital -- you know, when they’d accosted me with these wild accusations and I’d blurted out that embarrassing story. But I had a feeling, as I dressed for my lunch date with Eddie, that he’d want to bring it up today.

And I was proven right, because when he picked me up, the first words out of his mouth -- after “Hello,” and “How’s it going?” were, “How’s Kay?” 

“She’s fine,” I told him -- my voice calm, I hoped; flat. “She’s in L.A. right now.”

“Los Angeles? Really?” Eddie seemed a little surprised. “What for?” 

I turned from him, looked out the open window. He had the sunroof down today, a nice breeze blowing through his sensible sedan. It was late summer. We were headed for the pier for fish and chips and a few lungfuls of that fresh lake air. 

“They’re making a movie out of her book,” I said, watching the leafy streets roll past us, not looking at him. “She has to meet with producers, firm things up. I think they’re talking casting now.” 

“Oh, isn’t that interesting?” said Eddie, sounding very interested indeed. “Richie’s in showbiz, Kay’s in showbiz…” 

He was not subtle, this one. Not in the least. I got what he was hinting at, and I wanted no part in it. “Speaking of Richie,” I said, aiming to shift the subject, “you guys are coming up on two months married, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.” Eddie’s eyes fell to the ring on his finger. “God. Can’t believe we’re already talking about months.” 

“And _I_ can’t believe the two of you tied the knot right there in the hospital.”

“Yeah, well, it couldn’t wait any longer,” he said, and looked over at me, and smiled. “At least you were there to celebrate with us.”

“Only because I’d just delivered _your_ baby,” I said, and laughed. “And then you two had the audacity to make me get all dolled up and be your maid of honor, too.” 

“Please. As if there was any other woman for the job.” 

I laid a hand over my heart. “I’m honored, Eddie. Really.”

“And whenever we have the real wedding, the proper ceremony,” Eddie continued, “I want you to be my maid of honor then, too. I’m calling dibs. Richie doesn’t get you.”

“Aww, Eddie,” I said, genuinely touched now, not faking it. “I didn’t realize you guys were even planning anything like that.”

“Yeah, yeah. When Butch is finally out of the NICU and we’ve all settled down a little, we’ll throw a real party. Invite all our friends, dance the night away, drink champagne. Richie deserves it.” 

Something about the way he said it -- the tone of his voice, the real love there, I don’t know; it opened me up, cracked something fragile in me. 

“Eddie,” I began, a little nervous, “mind if I ask you something?”

“Sure,” he said. 

“When did you, um…” I paused, took a breath. “When did you know?”

“When did I know what?”

“You know, when did you know that Richie was… I don’t know, the one? Capital T, capital O?” 

“Well, you know, I didn’t. For a long time. I couldn’t.” He sighed, just a little. “Didn’t even remember him. Just, like, the shape of him. This vague outline.”

I nodded. I knew precisely what he meant -- although, for me, the contours of the amnesia were always a bit different. I saw things, knew things, even if I couldn’t always place them in the stream of my memory. Blame the deadlights.

“So when you walked into that Chinese restaurant… He came back to you?” 

“Exactly,” he says. “It was, ‘Oh, hello, you’re the person I’ve been missing for 27 years.’.”

He was so in love it almost hurt me to hear him talk. “So you knew when you were younger, then,” I said -- not a question. “27 years ago, I mean. When you were a kid, you knew.”

“Oh, sure. Looking back, it’s clear enough to me that I had a crush on him. I wouldn’t have known to call it that at the time, of course. When he’d call me ‘cute, cute, cute,’ or pinch my cheeks, I just…” 

And there, he actually stopped talking, trailed off into what I can only call a schoolboy giggle. His face was turning pinker by the second.

“Christ, you’re just… _besotted_ ,” I laugh, more with him than at him. “Have you _ever_ had feelings for anyone else?”

I expect him to give me some line about Myra, how she wasn’t _all_ bad. Instead, he says, “Well, Bill.”

“Oh,” I said. “Naturally.”

Eddie laughed. “Let he among us who is without an embarrassing childhood crush on Bill Denbrough cast the first stone.”

“Well, see, this is what I’m getting at.” I lean in, closer. “We all had crushes as kids, sure. But when did you know you wanted to marry Richie? Have a kid with him? Build a real, grown-up life with him?” 

“That’s three different questions,” he said.

“And? Are you going to give me three different answers?”

“Sure,” he said, and, eyes still on the road ahead, he lifted a hand, pointed up and out of the sunroof: “ _One_ , I knew I wanted to marry Richie when he hauled me out of the sewer in Derry and held me in his arms ‘til the ambulance roared up, and the rest of you had to literally pry me out of his gorilla grip so the paramedics could take a look at me.”

“Oh, yeah, he did _not_ want to let you go,” I said. 

“Sure didn’t,” he said, and I saw him smile to himself. “And he still hasn’t, you know. Let me go.” 

I rolled my eyes, looked out to the window so he wouldn’t see how wide I was grinning. “Richie and Eddie, sittin’ in a tree…” 

“To answer your second question,” he went on, fully ignoring my teasing, “I knew I wanted to have a kid with him when you showed up on our doorstep and offered us a kid.”

“Really?” I turned back, looked at him. “You hadn’t thought about it before that?”

“I mean, we’d been together six weeks,” he said. “You don’t have that talk six weeks in.” 

“Not unless your lunatic best friend shows up pregnant and weeping on your doorstep.” 

“Correct,” he said. “And then, your last question: when did I know that I wanted to … what was it you said? Something about building an adult life?”

I nodded. “Something like that.”

“First night in the NICU,” he said, no hesitation. “When we’d just come off this colossal fight, and he’d been out drinking, and we weren’t sure the baby was even going to make it through the night. I needed him to show up. To sober up. And he did. And he’s kept it up every day since.” He took a breath. “It wasn’t really a matter of knowing, right then, that I wanted to build a life with him. We just… you know, started building it. Together.” 

I gave a weak nod. “Wow.” I was biting my lip, hard -- feeling the impulse to cry, trying hard not to. “You two are awfully lucky. I hope you know that.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said -- and then, as we hit a red light, he turned and looked at me, brow lifted, questioning. “Why are you asking me all this, anyway? Finally decided to tell Kay you’re in love with her?”

I felt my heart pick up, but I didn’t look at him. “I’m not in love with her,” I said. I kept my voice flat.

“That’s a yes, then.” 

“Eddie, it’s not going to happen,” I said, again dispassionate.

“It’s already happening,” Eddie said. He laughed, disbelieving, when I rolled my eyes. “Bev. Honestly. It seems pretty fucking obvious to everybody but you. She’s been totally devoted to you through all of this. Visiting you every day in the hospital, putting you up in her home before _and_ after…” 

“Because we’re _friends_ , Eddie.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “We’ve been friends for years. We went through this whole… you know, this awful, traumatizing thing together. My husband coming after both of us, right?” I look over, check his face for understanding. “And then after all that, after Derry, through my pregnancy, she’s been… I mean, really wonderful about making room for my mess, being patient with me.” 

“So she’s been your friend for ages,” Eddie said, slowly, “and you went through something traumatizing together, and you left your spouse, and then Kay -- again, your long-time friend -- she became your key source of emotional support.”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you. Is that so hard to wrap your head around?”

“Not at all,” Eddie said, and looked at me like I was stupid. “The exact same thing happened to me and Richie. And now we’re married.”

“Goddammit, Eddie.” I turned, again, away from him, tilted my forehead against the glass pane. “Just because you go through something with someone, and you bond… it doesn’t mean…”

“Take your time,” Eddie said, smugly, as I stammered. 

I lifted my head, glared at him. “Me and Ben,” I said. “I really thought we were in love. I did. Moved all the way to Nebraska for him, and I made it, what, a month and a half?” 

“Have you considered that Ben’s a man?” he said. “And you may not be attracted to men?”

“I’m not gay.” I spit it out. “I was married to a man for over a decade.” 

Eddie looked at me sideways. “And I was married to a woman for over a decade.” 

I sighed. “That’s different.” 

“How is it different?”

“I mean, _you’re_ different. Different from me.” 

“No, no. Explain to me how it’s different. How _we’re_ different.” Eddie was getting bossy now, talking like a litigator, or -- well, like the risk analyst that he was. “Explain how I can be gay, despite having been married to a woman, but you couldn’t possibly be a lesbian -- or even bisexual, let’s put that on the table -- because you married a man.”

“Well, for starters, Eddie, you basically married your mother,” I said. “I mean, you’ve told me as much. It wasn’t about attraction at all. You were just… I don’t know, drawn to something familiar. Better the devil you knew, right?”

“Okay. Sure. I married my mother.” Eddie shot me a pointed look. Very pointed. “And your husband. Did he have much in common with your father? Anything at all?” 

“Fuck you,” I said, but there was no real malice in it. If he were anyone else, I would have smacked him. I’d have swung the car door open, screamed at him to go fuck himself, stormed off with middle fingers raised high. But this was Eddie, and he was right, so I shrank into my seat and I mumbled, “Nail on the fucking head.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, voice softer now. He was slowing down, gentling his approach. “I really am. But I really don’t think it’s healthy for you to keep ignoring this.”

We were stuck in traffic, the pier still aeons away. It was hot out. I was sweating through the seatbelt. 

“I’m not ignoring anything,” I told him, grumpily. “You’re just projecting onto me.”

“Sure. Yeah. You do remind me of myself,” he said. “And I’m gay, Beverly. I am. I’ve probably known, on some level, since I was a kid. I just couldn’t make myself say it out loud until... Christ, this past year, really.”

“So you’re calling me a liar?” 

“I’m saying,” he said, patiently, “that knowing something and telling the truth about something are two very different propositions.” 

“Okay, well, unlike you, I haven’t ‘known since I was a kid.’” I curled my fingers, made bitchy little air-quotes around the words. “Matter of fact, I’ve been having sex with men since I was a kid.” 

Eddie took a long breath out. “Beverly.”

“It’s true.” 

“You…” He paused. “Jesus, I can’t talk about this and drive at the same time.” 

And so he veered out of the cramped lane, no easy task, and drove us onto a leafy side-street, and parallel-parked us between strangers. He turned the key in the ignition. I heard the engine halt. He turned to me. 

“You were a child,” he said, and though his voice was steady, I could hear the heartbreak straining through it. “You did not get to make that decision for yourself.”

“Of course,” I said. “I know that. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” 

Another deep breath in. “Sure,” he said. “It happened. And now you’re an adult. You’re making your own choices.” He reached out, like he was going to lay a hand on my arm, but then he hesitated, brought his fingers down over the cupholders between us. Like he thought I was too fragile to touch. “And from where I’m sitting, it looks like you’ve freely chosen to leave your… leave Ben, okay, and co-habitate with a woman for nearly a year.” As I opened my mouth to protest, he lifted a hand, and hurried: “A woman with whom, by the way, you _have_ had sex.”

“Once.” I hissed the word. “ _One_ time, Eddie.” 

“Straight women do not have sex with other women!” Eddie insisted, eyes wild. “Not even once!”

“Yes, they do!” I insisted right back. ‘It happens all the damn time, Eddie! And it doesn’t mean a thing!”

“Okay. Enough. You have to stop with this ‘it didn’t mean anything’ shit.” Eddie’s jaw was tight, genuine anger spilling into each and every word. I was about to interrupt, challenge him, but he lifted my hand, stopped me. “Can you honestly sit there and tell me that your relationship with Kay is less meaningful, says less about who you are, than your relationship with Tom? Why was _that_ real, but your relationship with Kay is just a joke?” 

“I never said it was a joke!” I clawed back. “An experiment, maybe, but --”

“Right, yeah. Because experiments always end with you moving into the home of the woman you experimented with.”

“Because we couldn’t just be roommates,” I said, venomous. “We couldn’t just be friends.”

“Oh, no, you definitely could,” Eddie said. “But you clearly don’t want to be her roommate. Or her friend. You want more than that.” 

“I keep telling you that’s not what I want.”

“And that’s just it.” Eddie threw up his hands. “That’s the problem. You want it so, so much! Anyone can see it! But you keep telling yourself you don’t want it.” He sighed, looked at me, his tone almost apologetic. “Or you don’t even know what it means to want something. Maybe that’s it. That’s how it was for me, anyway.” 

I don’t answer. I can’t. Because he’s got a point, truly: what do I want? I realize, contemplating the question, that I’ve never truly been permitted to want anything. 

I certainly didn’t want my father to have sex with me, but he did it regardless. I didn’t want to look after the Hartleys’ other foster kids, or become a full-time caretaker at fourteen, but they made me do it, anyway. I’d kissed Bill in the school play -- not because I wanted to kiss him, but because my character wanted to kiss his. And I’d paid for it for years, been dubbed a slut by all the girls I’d hoped to befriend. That, I guess, was a want: my desire for female friendship. But it was dead on arrival. I never met a girl who liked me, a girl I trusted.

Not ‘til Kay. 

Well, so what? A single female friend does not a lesbian make. I’d had plenty of boyfriends before Tom. Granted, I’d usually stayed with these men longer than I’d have liked, since paying the rent all on my own would have been a struggle. And with Tom, Christ -- I honestly think I married him because I was afraid of what he’d to do me if I didn’t. I know that’s why I stayed with him all those years, all those times he beat me. He’d kill me if I left. And if he couldn’t do that, he’d try, the way he was trying now, to sink my label. 

So where did that leave me? I’d wanted Ben and Bill that weekend in Derry, hadn’t I? But what, exactly, had I wanted from them? I wanted to be safe; I wanted to be loved. And I was accustomed to using sex to get those things: safety, and love. Could I truly say that I wanted either of them? Had I wanted them the way I’d wanted Kay the night we went home with the man with the Russian novels? That, I know, was want. Pure want. I wanted to make her come. I wanted to look at her, touch her, kiss every inch of her private skin. I wanted her to do the same to me. Bringing myself to orgasm in the bathroom afterward, I’d been ashamed of just how badly I’d wanted those things, how naked and filthy my desire had been.

And then, as if he were reading my mind -- my dirty, dirty mind -- Eddie spoke again. 

“You’re allowed to want things, Bev,” he said, quietly. “I know you’re not used to that. I wasn’t, either.” He paused, took a breath. “I get it, you know? You grow up with people who just take and take and take what they want. People who don’t give a fuck who they hurt in the process. You know what I’m talking about. I know you do.” 

“I do,” I told him, because I did. 

“And you don’t want to be like them,” he went on. “You want to be better than the people who took from you. So you veer off to the other extreme. You never ask for what you want. And if anyone ever offers you something you want, you still say no. And you tell yourself, ‘I’m being good. Denying myself good things -- this is how to be good.’ But you don’t have to be good, Bev. You don’t.”

“Eddie, I…” I paused, took in a shaky breath. “I can’t. Me and Kay… even if I did, you know, feel that way…”

“And you do,” he interrupted. “You do.”

“If I told her how I felt about her,” I said, “it would ruin our friendship.”

And I looked him in the eye on _destroy_. I slowed down, made sure he heard me. I waited for him to say, “Yes, Bev. You’re right. I apologize.” But he didn’t. 

Instead, he opened his mouth, and, with all the love in the world, he said, “Ruin it.” 

We never made it to our lunch date, Eddie and I, settling instead for the McDonald’s drive-thru. He drove me back to Kay’s place, and he told me, “Think about what I said, okay?” I told him that I would. And then I didn’t. I placed everything I’d felt during our talk in a little box and I shoved it to the darkest, dustiest corner of my mind to grow pungent mold. I opened all the windows in Kay’s house, changed the sheets, dusted every shelf. I was, technically, on maternity leave, which left me plenty of time to make the place beautiful, apologize in action for the amount of time I’d spent squatting. 

And so it was that when Kay arrived home from her trip to Los Angeles, she found me on my hands and knees on the floor of her kitchen, scrubbing between the tiles, clad in a sweaty sports bra and a ratty old pair of boxers some former boyfriend of hers had left behind. 

She dropped her suitcase when she saw me. 

“Damn, girl,” she sang out, and pulled me up into a hug. “You look fucking gorgeous.”

Now, I’ve just described what I was wearing and what I was doing. I think it’s fair to say I didn’t feel gorgeous in the least. So all I could do was laugh in reply, and reach up to adjust my ponytail. Not the most compatible with this newly shoulder-length hair of mine. Kept falling out. Maybe I ought to get a boy-cut again. Then I imagined what Richie and Eddie would say if I did; then I banished the thought. 

“God, look at you,” she repeated, as she pulled away from the hug, and held me at arm’s length. She looked my body up and down. She whistled, actually _whistled_. “Shit! You started working out while I was in L.A., huh?” 

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, and slipped out of her grip. “I’ve still got a lot of baby weight to lose.” 

“Babe,” she said, sincerely, “you do not need to lose any weight.” 

I rolled my eyes. “Kay, thanks, but --”

“I’m serious. I think post-baby Beverly is even hotter than pre-baby.”

“Really, Kay, I --”

“Like, your tits alone,” she said. “I literally want to _motorboat_ you, I mean…” 

And then she stepped forward, like she was really going to do it, really plant her face between my tits. I lurched back, put my hands up, froze in place. 

I wasn’t scared, mind you, that she’d do it. I was scared of how deeply I wanted her to do it.

“Oh, fuck. She took in the look on my face; her own was ashen. “Beverly, I’m so sorry.”

I was breathing heavily now, and self-conscious of how much my chest must be heaving. I crossed my arms, hoped that’d flatten out the flesh. “It’s fine,” I said. She shook her head.

“No. It’s not fine. I know you’ve got this whole history of, like…” She paused, bit her lip. I could see tears -- real, anguished tears -- beginning to well up. “Like, domestic violence, and I didn’t mean to… to trigger…” 

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Kay,” I grumbled. “It’s not that. I just… these jokes you make sometimes, they really…”

“Yeah, yeah, it was a dumb joke,” she interrupted. “I agree. I just want you to feel good about yourself. About your body.” 

“Really, Kay?” My voice -- how embarrassing, Christ -- was trembling. “That’s it? That’s the only reason you say those things?”

She looked confused. “What do you mean?”

“All day long, telling me how beautiful I am, how much you love my body?” I took a deep breath. “And it’s all because you want to boost my self-esteem, yeah? That’s why?”

“What are you…” She shook her head, baffled. She was really lost at sea now. “Beverly, I don’t know what you’re getting at. I mean, if the compliments make you uncomfortable, I’ll stop.” 

“Not just the compliments,” I said. “When you say you want to live with me forever, or raise kids with me, or… or _motorboat_ me… You say it like you’re joking, but I don’t know if you are.”

“Beverly,” Kay said, “what the fuck are you talking about?”

It came out of my mouth tiny, microscopic: “Do you have feelings for me?” 

“What?” Her mouth hung open; her voice echoed loud in the kitchen. “No, Beverly, I… Jesus, why would you… I don’t…”

“Because I… I think that I might.” I didn’t know I was going to say it. I regretted it as soon as I did. As soon as I saw the look in her eyes. The shock. The terror. “I don’t know, Kay. God. I’m sorry. Forget I said that. I’m going through a lot right now.” 

“Beverly,” said Kay, “I…”

She went quiet. She stepped forward; I took a step back. “It’s okay,” I said, and put my hands up again. “I’m not asking you for anything. I just… when you say thing like that, I guess it makes me wonder if you… if we…” I cut myself off, shook my head. Stop talking, Bev. Just stop talking. “Never mind. It’s fine. I’ll go.”

“Beverly --” 

That was all she seemed to be able to say anymore. My name. Beverly. She never cut it short. All three syllables, the whole winding river of it, every time. 

“I’ll go,” I said, and I turned, and I left, and she didn’t stop me as I made my way up to the stairs to -- well, to “my room,” but it wouldn’t be my room much longer, would it? For the third time in less than a year, I was about to pack my bags and leave. 

Maybe Ben would take me back. This is what I was thinking about, up in my room, packing my bags. I didn’t feel for him what he felt for me, but that was okay. I could pretend. I was good at that, pretending. I’d been doing it my whole life, really. So what if I was too fucked up to ever be a good partner to anyone? Who cared if I’d just destroyed my closest friendship? Maybe I’d never have what Richie and Eddie had, but I could live with that. Just watch me. Packing up, moving on: it’s what I’d always done best. 

I don’t know when, exactly, or how long it took her to get there, but at some point in the frenzied stuffing of my suitcase, Kay appeared in the door. She rapped on the frame with her knuckles.

“Can I come in?” she asked. She’d clearly been crying.

“Go ahead,” I said, flatly, and continued packing as she sat on the edge of the bed. 

“I’ve been downstairs,” she began, carefully, “just thinking over everything you said.” 

“Okay,” I said, and didn’t look her in the eye.

“And I just want to apologize, first of all, for making those comments,” she said. “If I’d known you felt that way, I never would’ve said any of it. I can see now that it seemed like I was playing with your heart. I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you.”

“All right,” I said. I didn’t say, “Really, Kay? ‘I never meant to hurt you?’ You’re a writer. You can do better than that.” But I sure as hell wanted to. 

“I don’t want you to pack your bags or leave,” Kay said. “I want you to stay as long as you like. I’ll watch what I say. I won’t make any more jokes like that.” She bit her lip. “I just don’t want to wreck our friendship, Beverly. You mean too much to me. You’re my best friend.” 

I folded a shirt. “You’re my best friend, too,” I said. It came out like _fuck you_.

“Please don’t go,” she said. She was trying hard to be the adult; I could see that much. Me, though? I’d become fifteen again, forever the sulky foster kid whose greatest gift is knowing when to get lost. “Unpack your bags. We’ll get takeout. Watch a good romcom. You can stay here as long as you like. It’ll be like it’s always been.” 

I made myself look at her, then, read the lines of her face. She looked hopeful. She was offering me a way back in. For just a second, if I squinted, I could see it. If I took her up on the offer, we’d continue the way we always had. The very best of friends: living with each other, getting drunk and kissing one another, each of us picking the other up after another bad break-up with another bad man. We’d lived like this a long time, hadn’t we? And it had worked for us, all these years, hadn’t it? 

She rose from the bed, stood before me, reached out. Her hand on my shoulder.

“I love you, Beverly,” she said, tenderly. “I just mean it the way I’ve always meant it.”

“Horseshit,” I said, and kissed her.

Only because there was no doubt left in my mind. Only because I knew, looking at her, listening to her, that we both wanted more than what she was offering. The years of us kissing and touching and pretending to be wives while never acknowledging what was real between us -- that was over. Done. I wanted all of her, forever. And she did, too, because she was kissing me back. Somehow, without my even realizing, she’d woven her tongue into my mouth. Her hands were in my hair, too, tugging out the ratty ponytail holder, raking through the loose, sweaty curls. This was new, electric, something I’d never felt before. 

No. Not true. I _had_ felt like this before. Once. 

“Tell me you remember.” I broke the kiss, pressed my lips to her ear. “The night we had that threesome. When I made you come.” 

I took her earlobe in my teeth; nipped. She let out a sharp cry.

“You don’t… don’t know how many times…” She breathed. “Just thinking about it, I… I’ve made myself come… hundreds, hundreds of times…” 

“I wasn’t imagining it?” I didn’t mean for it to come out a question; it did. “You felt it, too?” 

“I did,” she said. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to scare you.” 

Didn’t she know me? “Nothing scares me,” I told her. “Not anymore.” 

And then I lowered my hands to her shoulders and pushed her, lightly, onto the mattress. 

In the next instant, I was straddling her, my hips on hers, my mouth on hers, my hands curling in her hands. All around us were the stacks of clothing I hadn’t packed -- five minutes ago, when I’d been prepared to walk out of here, to leave her forever. I shoved the clothes aside to make room for us, and then I lifted my sports bra up and over my head.

Kay’s reaction -- eyes wide, breathy little gasp -- was hilarious. Arousing, too: how flushed her skin had become already, how much I’d riled her up just by pulling off my bra. Her hands reached up for my bare breasts, then hesitated. 

“Can I…” she began, and, charmed as I was that she’d had the courtesy to ask first, I didn’t wait for her to finish the request. I grabbed her hands. I brought them to my chest.

“Yes,” I told her, firmly. “You can.”

She was still awestruck, lips parted in wonder as she toyed with my nipples, rock-hard already. And it was this, her open mouth, that gave me my next idea. I batted away her hands, rocked forward. She looked up, confused, as I planted my palms on either side of her head.

“Suck on them, sweetheart,” I said. “I know how much you want to.” 

She gave me a look then, a look like, _are you kidding?_ A look like Christmas morning, like a kid in a candy store, like a starving man about to eat a meal he’s been waiting days for. Well, a starving woman, anyhow. She put her soft lips to my nipple and she sucked. She was, at first, gentle, but even this light touch, the soft swirl of her tongue, was enough to make me purr. I was getting wet. I could feel it. I reached for the crown of her head, raked my fingers through her black curls, and I held her up to me, brought her closer to my chest. She moaned out loud around the nipple, and then she shifted to the other, more forcefully this time, worrying the tip with her tongue, using her teeth. I’d never been with anyone so eager, so hungry. I couldn’t help but laugh.

“You love this, don’t you?” I told her, my voice soft, teasing. “You’ve wanted this forever.” She didn’t say anything in reply -- couldn’t, really, with my tit in her mouth -- but I heard her whine a wordless whimper, and then I saw her reach down, beneath the waistband of her skirt. That’s one of Kay’s things, always wearing skirts when she flies -- maxi skirts, big, loose, airy ones, for comfort. I took her wrist, held it. “Oh, no, you don’t,” I told her. I’d never been so… I don’t know, _dominant_ , for lack of a better word, in bed before. I found that I liked it an awful lot.

No, awful’s the wrong word. Not awful. No guilt. No shame. Nothing bad. I liked being a little bossy, loved it, even -- tugging her wrist away, sliding the fabric of her skirt up and over her thighs, and pushing the bridge of her underwear aside. 

Kay lifted her head as I brushed her clit. “Fuck, Beverly,” she moaned. “When you did that last time, all those years ago, I… I came so hard…” 

“I remember,” I told her, and kissed her again. I pressed my thumb to her clit, ground down, relished the moan she let loose. “And you’re going to come again for me, aren’t you?” 

“Yes,” Kay whimpered. “Oh, God, yes.” 

And she did come, only minutes later, with a sharp cry, her back bending like a bowstring against the mattress. I kissed her through it, and only when she was well and truly done, panting, breathless, her face half-buried in a pillow, I lifted a hand, dripping in her come. I spread my fingers just a little, watched gossamer ropes of it glisten between my knuckles in the low light. 

“Look at that,” I murmured. “Wow, Kay.” 

It was her turn, then, to take my wrist in hand. She looked in my eyes. She pressed her tongue to my fingers and she began to lick up her come, swirling her tongue around and around like she was giving head. I watched, breathless, until she pulled back, pressed a kiss to my fingertips.

“I want to make you come,” she said, and she took me in her arms, and kissed me. I felt a thrill coiling deep in my belly, felt how truly wet I’d become. I was ready. I wanted it, wanted her, badly. 

And then she said, “I want to know how you taste.” 

You hear sometimes about this “fight or flight” thing -- how our reaction to being scared is, supposedly, one of the two. I’ve been a fighter a fair few times in my life, and a flyer when that suited me better. But more often than not, I don’t fly. I don’t fight. I freeze. That’s what I did then, when I heard those words escape her mouth. I froze. Froze with my arms up, pressed against my chest to cover my breasts, suddenly feeling sick, feeling ugly, feeling small. I was conscious to an unbearable degree of how naked I was, and how wet. My heart beat fast and the veins in my head pulsed, too, and the room began to swirl around me. I wanted to lie down. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to take back the last glorious half hour.

And all because -- there’s no way to say this politely, so you’ll have to pardon me -- tasting me had been my dad’s _thing_ , his favorite part. He loved it best, and so, naturally, I hated it most. I won’t dwell on it. I don’t like to. I’d managed to make it to forty years of age without ever having to do it again, with anyone else. Tom, thankfully, never even brought it up. Neither did most of the ain’t-shit men I dated before him. Ben, bless his heart, wanting to be a good guy, had slipped it into some dirty talk on the plane from Derry to Hemingford Home. He’d brought his lips to my ear and whispered something about how when we got home, he was going to lay me down on the bed and slide between my thighs and kiss me right on my -- and I startled, spilled some of my champagne on the plane’s little plastic tray, and shook my head as fast as I could. “Oh, no, no,” I told him, and laughed, maybe a little shrilly. “I’ve never liked that.” He looked curious, a little sad, even, but he didn’t pry. 

Maybe he should have pried. Maybe I wanted him to pry.

Kay had always been one to pry. 

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” she said, in a voice like a pillow. 

I said, “Nothing,” and kept my arms up, hands in tight fists over my chest.

“Horseshit,” she said -- echoing me, earlier. “Did I set you off? You look all spooked.” I said nothing. She said, “Please talk to me.” 

Well, I didn’t want to talk. In the moment, I doubt I was even capable of talking. None of the sex I’d had before had involved a lot of talk. I wasn’t used to being asked questions, not, “Do you like this?” or “Are you okay?” Tom’s favourite line had been _shut up, bitch._ When Kay lifted her hand, I flinched away -- and realized, seconds later, that she’d been moving to rest a hand on my cheek. Not to hit me.

But she must have seen the fear in my eyes, the raw terror, because she winced away, then, looking all distraught, like she’d just inflicted some horror on me. And God, I couldn’t take that. I couldn’t make Kay think that she was a predator. She wasn’t. She hadn’t hurt me any more than the breeze hurts me when it slams a door shut on a windy day and I leap up, startled, at the sound. 

So when she said, “I’m so sorry, Beverly,” my answer came as a reflex: “No. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s my fault.”

“Your fault?” Well, Christ; now she really looked devastated. “Beverly, no.”

Why, God, did I always do this? It was as though I’d been targeted by so many monsters that I made the people who loved me believe they were monsters, too. I hadn’t thought about it since Nebraska, the way I’d heard Ben weeping behind his bedroom door after I dumped him for no good reason. But I was reminded of it now, seeing Kay, reading her face. She was looking at me like I was a newborn kitten, like she’d just trampled my tail. There was this fear in me, a fear I couldn’t shake, and when it showed itself before good people, people like Ben, like Kay, I’m sure they wondered if they’d done something to inspire that fear. 

“What do you need?” Kay was saying. “Tell me how I can help, Beverly. Do you need space? A drink of water? Do you want me to hold you?”

“I’m cold,” I managed, finally, though it wasn’t an answer to any of the questions she’d asked. And yet, still, she nodded, and reached for a fluffy throw blanket beneath the piles of laundry I’d been packing up. She pulled it around me, the softest side against my skin, until I was cocooned in it. Maybe it was this new warmth, or just the weight of it, but somehow, it made me feel safer, this blanket. 

“How are you feeling?” she asked, and then, when I didn’t answer: “Do you want to talk about it? Or should I just leave you alone?” 

I didn’t, truthfully, want to talk about it. I’d only ever really talked about it once before, in that absurd burst of bravery I told you about already, right on the heels of conquering Pennywise, at fourteen. You know, when I blurted out to my guidance counselor that my father was in the habit of raping me damn near every night? I talked about it then, in that appointment, and I spent the bulk of the next month talking about it. To social workers, doctors, cops: I talked and talked and talked, and I never understood why they couldn’t just write my words down and refer back. It struck me as cruel, compelling me to relive the nightmare over and over again, out loud. And so, when I was finally permitted to stop talking about it, I was grateful. I relished my own silence.

Maybe that was the problem.

“We can talk about it,” I said, my voice about as shaky as I felt. “It’s just… hard.” 

“Okay,” she said, and tugged the blanket tighter around me. “Take your time.” 

“So, when you said, um…” I paused, took a breath, grounding myself, “I think it was, ‘I want to know how you taste?’”

“Yeah?” She nodded, eyes steady on mine. “What happened, love?”

“My dad used to say that.”

She couldn’t quite bite back a little gasp. “Oh, Beverly. Fuck. I had no idea --”

“You couldn’t have known,” I interrupted, and then swallowed, and said, “It’s just that I don’t… well, I haven’t done… _that_ … since… since I was…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. Couldn’t say “a kid,” couldn’t say “fourteen.” I couldn’t. 

“Well, we don’t have to do that, then. Ever. And, you know, honestly, we should’ve stopped. We should’ve talked about what you wanted. I should’ve asked you.” She reached out her hand, then hesitated. “Can I touch you?” 

“Please,” I said, and so she did, inching closer, and then putting her arms around me, pulling me to her, into her lap. It took us a moment to get comfortable, but when we did, I found that she was cradling me like a baby. I pulled the blanket closer over my chest. I felt like a child, and the thought made me smile. How unusual; I hadn’t been safe as a kid, or happy, ever. 

“We’ve got a lot to figure out,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No, no. You don’t have anything to apologize for.” She paused, hugged me close. “I just meant that I want to do the work, you know? I want to figure this out with you.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s… good.” 

I wish I wasn’t like this, honestly: so stunted, so emotionally constipated. She didn’t seem to mind all that much, though. She was still holding me, still looking at me like the sun shone out my ass. 

“I know it’ll be complicated.” She laughed. “Hell, I mean, fifteen minutes ago, I was in here telling you I wanted to just be friends. She reached for my hand, poking through the folds of the blanket, and held it. “But I don’t want that, Beverly. You were right. I want more than that. Everything. That’s what I want.” She pulled away, just a little, and tilted her forehead close to mine, and said, “I’m never going to hit you. I’m not going to bruise you, choke you, hurt you. I will never, ever make you do anything that you don’t want to do.” 

And that, in the end, is what it took. I had to hear her spell it out: the truth in her promise, the safety I’d share with her, the finality of all those aeons of abuse being done, gone, vanishing behind me. 

I could’ve cried, but instead, I lifted my hands and let the blanket fall from my shoulders. And I pulled her close and kissed her. Kissed her because I didn’t know what to say by way of reply. Because words had failed me. And this, I know, was an issue -- kissing instead of talking. 

But it was just like she said: I’d figure it out. And I’d do it with her. 


	18. Eddie, Six Months

If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say our daughter’s got a future as a singer. There’s an eloquence in the way she cries. She’s articulate. We never have to guess with her; she tells us, every time, precisely what she needs. The high, shrill pulse lets us know that she’s hungry and wishes to be full. If the sobbing is lower, more anguished, she’s wet, and she’d like to be dry. When she whimpers, airy and desperate, she’s lonely; she wants to be held. All of this without even the assistance of language. It’s very impressive.

The shriek that cut through the darkness that Saturday morning told me quite clearly it was time for a bottle. And though it was early, too early -- the numbers on the clock blinking brightly through the black, signaling _4:23 AM_ \-- I opened my eyes. I lifted the duvet. Here, for free, is something nobody told me about parenthood: even if nothing in you wants to wake at 4:23 AM to feed your baby, you do it. What you want comes to matter less and less. Or, rather: what you want becomes increasingly synonymous with what the baby needs. 

My feet were almost to the floor when I felt Richie, next to me, stir.

“I’ll get ‘er,” he slurred, barely audible through his thick sleep. 

His arm emerged from beneath the blankets, began to flail blindly for his glasses on the nightstand. All I could do was laugh. 

“Back to bed, honey,” I told him. I leaned back onto the mattress, kissed his cowlick. “Let me handle this one. You were up so late with her last night.”

“‘Last night,’” he repeated, mocking; the best impression of me he could muster half-asleep with his face buried in the second pillow. “No such thing as night and day anymore.” 

He was very right. These days, we slept when we could, no matter the color of the sky outside the nursery’s window. “Still, it’s around 5:00 AM,” I said. “This is when I usually get up.” 

I waited for him to argue with me. No reply came. I looked over and saw that he’d fallen swiftly back to sleep. So I found my slippers in the dark, and then I opened the door, taking care to close it slowly on my way out into the hall. I didn’t want to wake Richie again. Our daughter grew louder the closer you got to her -- which isn’t novel, I know, but I’ve always been struck by it. Our kid, a beacon.

I wouldn’t say I was all the way awake, not just yet, as I entered the tiny Wild West of her nursery. That, in the end, was the theme we’d gone with. A bit of an esoteric one for a baby, but fitting, we thought, given her naming. “Butch” had stuck, see, but neither of us could bring ourselves to print it on the birth certificate. So we’d arrived at a compromise: Cassidy. (I was glad, too, that we’d already settled on making her a Tozier. _Cassidy Kaspbrak_ ; what an alliterative horrorshow that would’ve been.) Luckily for us, we counted an architect and a fashion designer among our close friends, and they aided us -- well, did the work for us -- in furnishing and decorating a nursery fit for an infant outlaw. There was, naturally, a dappled rocking horse. Ben had found specialty wallpaper printed like a pink and orange desert sunrise, replete with cacti and tumbleweeds. All the fabrics, courtesy of Beverly, were funky shades of plaid, with spare farm-animal-print accents, just for fun. Horseshoes, you know. A little cow-print here and there.

And so I sank into the soft black-and-white backing of the rocking chair, holding Cassidy in the crook of my arm, wielding a bottle of formula in the other hand. She was fussing this morning, jerking her head away, fanning out her tiny fingers. I held her close to me. I whispered, “You’re okay. Daddy Eddie’s here.” I touched the rubber nipple to her chin, her lips, waiting with a patience I hadn’t known I’d possessed -- not before fatherhood, at least. Nothing. She just wasn’t having it this morning.

“It’s because you’ve got her on formula.” 

It was a voice I knew well, but one I was hardly expecting to hear in my daughter’s nursery at four o’clock in the morning. And yet, when I lifted my head, there she was: my mother, hands clasped over her stomach, seated across from me in the second rocking chair, the one draped in yellow gingham. 

“She knows what she really needs,” said my mother. “Real milk. Her mother’s milk.”

“I appreciate the concern,” I told her, “but her mother’s milk isn’t an option.” 

“Baby formula’s full of heavy metals.” She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, narrowed her eyes at me. “Lead, arsenic, mercury. Put a magnet up against the side of that bottle. All the shavings will flock right to it. You’ll see.”

“I’ve done my research,” I said. “We wouldn’t be feeding her formula if it wasn’t safe.” 

“You wouldn’t have to feed her formula if you hadn’t married…”

“Please don’t finish that sentence,” I interrupted, in as polite a voice I could manage, given the squalling baby in my arms. Not polite enough, though: I saw fat tears begin to bead in the corners of my mother’s eyes, watched them snake down her cheeks and settle in shallow quarries of eczema. 

“How dare you?” Her voice wobbled. “You think I don’t know how to raise a child? I raised you, didn’t I?” 

I could have said, “I’m sorry, Mommy.” And maybe I should have. But instead, I told her, “I don’t need your help.” And then, when she looked incensed, I said: “I’m more than capable of caring for my own daughter. I’m good at it.” 

“What happened?” She gazed past me, her eyes out of focus behind her thick lenses. “I used to be the one who looked after you. Back when you… when you…” She raised a trembling finger, pointed to Cassidy, in my arms. “When you were that small. Tiny enough that I could scoop you up in my arms and kiss you on your button nose. My little Eddie-bear.”

“Eddie-bear,” I repeated. I lowered my head to my daughter; she opened her mouth, at last, and began to drink from the bottle. “Huh. That was a play on ‘teddy bear,’ wasn’t it? I never realized.”

“That’s right.” She seemed calmer, my mother, after hearing my reply. She reached up a sleeve of her tracksuit, dabbing at the salt drying on her face. “You loved to cuddle. Always so affectionate.” She laughed. “I told you that’d get you in trouble one day, didn’t I? How much you loved hugging and kissing?” 

“You did, yeah,” I said. I didn’t want to look at her. “You made me really afraid of touching other people. Being touched. And you made me afraid of sex, too. Always going on about how it’d make me sick. Maybe even kill me.” 

“Well, can you blame me?” she said, and chuckled, more than a little cruelly. “You wound up with another man, after all.” I opened my mouth to reply to this, but she lifted a hand, cut me off: “I always knew you would.”

This shook me. I lifted my head from my lap, my daughter. “Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked her. “Why’d you scare me shitless about AIDS, and… and… and pedophiles, and…” 

“I thought it would help you,” she said, plainly. “And clearly, for a while, it did. You were very good about self-control, Eddie, even after I left you. Up until this...” She scoffed, waved a hand. “... _rebellion_ of yours.” 

“This isn’t a rebellion,” I said. “It’s a marriage.”

She rolled her eyes. “Well,” she huffed. “At least you’ve finally given me a grandchild.” 

She rose from the rocking chair then, and she crossed the floor. Her sneakers were near silent on the circular rug -- a length of rope, coiled up tight, lasso-esque. When she reached me, she bent so close that I could smell her mint-smeared breath. She smiled fondly at Cassidy.

She asked, “Can I hold her?” 

I looked at my mother. “You want to hold Cassidy?”

“Yes.”

“Right now?”

“Yes.” 

“No.” I was baffled. “I’m feeding her.” 

“Well,” she said, with a dismissive wave, “when she’s done eating, then.” 

“No,” I told her, once more. “I don’t want you touching her.”

“You don’t mean that,” she said.

“I do mean it,” I said, and I looked my mother right in her rheumy eyes. “I’m so glad you’re never going to meet her.”

I waited for my mother’s reaction, waited to see the injury appear on her face. But when I blinked, I found that she was, suddenly, no longer there. I couldn’t see her, couldn’t hear her labored breath or smell the putrid lavender soap she’d used in the nursing home at the end of her life. No trace of her. As if she’d never set foot in the nursery. 

Cassidy was dozing in my arms now, sated. The rubber nipple had slipped from her mouth sometime during my mother’s visit. A thin line of milk dribbled down her chin. I lifted my thumb, wiped it away.

“I’m so glad you’re never going to meet her,” I repeated to my daughter. I kissed her sweet-smelling downy head. She gurgled happily in her sleep; she was glad, too. 

I returned Cassidy, gently, to her crib. Not a blanket or a stuffed animal in sight, naturally: just a mattress wrapped in a fitted sheet, silver horseshoes on sunny yellow hay. She would be safe in her sleep. She would have sweet dreams. 

I stood there a moment, watching the mobile of fluffy white sheep spin above Cassidy’s crib. I wondered what to do next. Should I get my morning started? We certainly had a big day ahead of us: Beverly and Kay were coming over for brunch; apparently, they had some “big news” to share. We knew, of course -- we’d known for months -- that they’d started seeing each other. And I was happy for them, obviously. Especially after that agonizing talk I’d had with Bev some months ago in the car, en route to our aborted lunch at the pier. But feigning surprise would be difficult. Richie and I had all but gotten them together, for Christ’s sake. 

At any rate, I had a brunch to prepare. I had to take a shower, wash my face, spend at least a half-hour on the Peloton. And, of course, the final point on my daily to-do list: I had to kiss Richie.

This morning, though, I decided to make this last item my first priority. Instead of hitting the shower, I went right back to bed, falling into the sheets, steering myself into Richie’s arms. He wasn’t all the way awake, I could tell, but he kissed me back, his early-morning stubble scraping over mine. 

“Morning,” he hummed into my mouth. “Everything good?”

“Everything,” I said, and kissed him once more. I would have laid my head on his chest, too, had my alarm clock not sounded off just then. I reached behind me, blindly, flailing for _off_ , or _snooze_ , or anything. Perry Como went quiet. Richie blinked at me through drowsy brows.

“Did you hit snooze?” he asked, a little surprised.

“Sure did,” I said.

“You never hit snooze.”

“Maybe I want an extra fifteen minutes of time in bed.”

“Time in bed?” Richie laughed. “Not… bedtime?” 

I laughed at him, stuck my tongue out. “Horndog,” I said. And he laughed, too, but he also reached around me, pulled me onto his chest, and nudged my knees apart with his own. He laced himself into me. His hands roamed, rucking up fabric here, squeezing there. We kissed with no destination in mind, lazy, slow. Outside our window, the sun began to rise.

When the next cry sounded over the baby monitor, it was Richie’s turn to roll away from me. “I’m on it,” he said.

“You don’t have to --” I began, but he shook his head, shut me up.

“That’s her, like, super-low cry,” he said. “Her ‘I made a poopie’ cry. Your least favorite kind.”

“So chivalrous,” I teased him, and tossed him his boxers. He tugged them on -- I watched them stretch over his thighs, licked my lips -- and then he leaned over the mattress, pressed a kiss to my forehead.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said. “Don’t you dare leave this bed.” 

“I won’t,” I said.

And I didn’t, not for a long time. I didn’t turn off the baby monitor, either. I lay in bed and I listened to the gentle crackle of Richie’s voice: _That’s right. There you go. Good girl. Look at all those poopies! Wow!_ He loved her so much. You could hear it in every word. Even “poopies.” 

I rolled to the left, his side of the bed, into the shallow impression he’d left in the memory foam. I was smaller than he was, and so I fit, perfectly, into his silhouette. I pressed my nose to the mattress and I breathed in the smell of him. The tea-tree soap I’d made him use. His minty aftershave. The vague aroma of formulaic spit-up that had followed both of us ever since we’d become fathers. I lay there, in the emptiness he’d left behind. I consoled myself with the knowledge that he’d be back soon. 


End file.
